Outside Counsel Guidelines (OCGS) are commonly used these days, but comprehensive and clear guidelines are hardly universal. In this piece from Corporate Counsel Business Journal, Brenda Hansen, a senior consultant with Epiq who has drafted many OCGs, offers useful advice for developing effective guidelines.

Continue Reading The Care & Feeding of OCGs

In this interview with Corporate Counsel Business Journal, Mark Nastasi, founder and VP of contract management company CobbleStone Software, discusses the evolution of cost-effective and user-friendly contract and procurement management software applications and continuous innovation in Contract Lifecycle Management.

Continue Reading Technology Solutions for Corporate Law Departments

In this piece from Corporate Counsel Business Journal, Todd Purdy, VP of Epiq, discusses “myth-busting” data points derived from his experience with e-discovery review teams in the U.S. and India. “When you approach a vendor for managed review of documents for litigation or an investigation, every single one will tell you they have the best people,” Purdy says. “But if everyone has the best people, how do you know what sets service providers apart for you, your firm or company, and your specific need?” From there he trots out four myth busters to use in evaluating a landscape populated by what are, by and large, temp workers: 
 

  • Career Growth. “A Managed Review vendor who is sensitive to the needs of the rank-and-file reviewers will have a program in place for training reviewers for higher level tasks and management skills. More importantly, it will have ongoing
  • Continue Reading The Humanity of the Managed Review Temp

    During the pandemic, corporate law departments, forced to change, gathered, to varying degrees, forward thrust. “The most successful law departments will be those that leverage the momentum of the past two years to actively embrace transformative change, in how they integrate and operate both within their organization and in utilizing outside legal expertise,” says the recently released report from Thomson Reuters Institute, State of Corporate Law Departments, subtitled “law department performance in a post-pandemic world.” The report notes that law department priorities saw a subtle but important shift in emphasis. “While the enduring purpose of an organization’s legal function is to safeguard the business,” the report says, “a slightly higher number of respondents in our survey cited efficiency as a stronger priority for the department.” And that shift dictates the focus of this report on twin priorities – efficiency and effectiveness – that support the omnipresent function of safeguarding the business. The report, based on extensive benchmarking, reveals a consistent set of themes relevant for all law departments: rapidly evolving legal technology and digitization are trends that are happening now, and departments that lag behind risk perpetually playing catch-up; the need to focus on the right metrics to monitor performance

    Continue Reading Efficiency Emerges as Top Law Department Priority

    According to the 2023 edition of the biennial report on Alternative Legal Services Providers published by Thomson Reuters Institute, the Center on Ethics and the Legal Profession at Georgetown Law, and the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford, the ALSP market has “grown exponentially” and made “great in-roads” with corporate legal departments and law firms. “The market for alternative legal services providers is showing itself to be a highly dynamic part of the overall legal ecosystem and one that is growing at an increasing rate as it forges new paths to serving both traditional law firms and corporate law departments,” says the report, which is based on an online survey of decision-makers at law firms and corporate law departments in the U.S., UK, Canada, the EU and Australia. The maturing ALSP sector now accounts for a whopping $20.6 billion segment of the legal market, and the growth path is accelerating – to a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 20% from 2019 to 2021 from its already robust 15% CAGR between 2017 and 2019. “Both law firms and in-house counsel are increasingly seeing the value of alternative legal services providers,” says lead report author James W. Jones, a

    Continue Reading ALSPs: Zooming into Hyperdrive

    In this piece from Corporate Counsel Business Journal, two academics, Rick Burton, the David B. Falk Professor of Sport Management at Syracuse University, and Norm O’Reilly, dean of the Graduate School of Business at the University of Maine, discuss their book, Business the NHL Way: Lessons from the Fastest Game on Ice. Their goal, O’Reilly says, was to look at the National Hockey League and see what they could learn from a sport that’s had “unbridled business success” and share their insights with the broader business world. “One of the things that makes Norm and me interesting as academicians, and also as authors,” says Burton, “is that we’ve actually lived out in the business world that we write about. Norm is a partner in a thriving agency in Canada called T1, and I was the commissioner of a professional basketball league in Australia as well as the chief marketing officer of the US Olympic Committee for the Beijing Summer Olympics.” That’s why, they say, their work is akin to Moneyball, Michael Lewis’ bestsellers about data analytics and baseball, and allowed them to draw general business lesson from topics such as the permissive stance toward violence on the ice to the

    Continue Reading Lessons from the Bruising Business of Hockey