Operations

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Managers of law departments (and of law firms) often believe that there is an identifiable connection between one set of numbers and another. Perhaps they sense that the size of the plaintiff’s law firm has some bearing on the cost of defending a lawsuit; they feel the number of patents applied for rises and falls with their company’s R&D investment; or they’ve noticed that client satisfaction scores relate to keeping close to budget. Fortunately, those types of subjective impressions of managers can be tested and quantified. 
Continue Reading The Core of Correlation

For 10 years now, the Blickstein Group, in cooperation with Consilio, has been surveying Legal Ops and other law department professionals, focusing solely on the operations function and seeks to provide benchmarks that are useful to the largest law departments. They have just completed the 2017 survey, sponsored by QuisLex, Exterro, Onit, Wolters Kluwer, Legal Decoder, iManage and HighQ, and the results are fascinating as always.
Continue Reading Findings from the 10th Annual Law Department Operations Survey

You have to hand it to Firoz Dattu. The former Paul Weiss lawyer and founder of AdvanceLaw sure knows how to whip up a crowd. Earlier this year, with no small amount of media fanfare, Dattu unleashed something he calls the GC Thought Leaders Experiment. Haven’t heard of Firoz, or AdvanceLaw, or the Thought Leaders Experiment? No worries. Dattu trots out a nifty marital metaphor to describe the project.
Continue Reading Backstory: The “Yelpification” of Law

The ambitious webinar hosted by Metropolitan Corporate Counsel on September 7 took on four big topics that were filtered through surveys primarily directed at legal operations departments. The topics were information security; analytics and artificial intelligence (AI); cloud adoption; and discovery and content management.
Continue Reading Legal Ops Professionals Weigh In: Higher level of analysis in law departments drives shifts in the industry

When Matt Fawcett took over as general counsel at NetApp, Inc. in 2010, he knew he wanted to create a legal operations department. He didn’t know he would hire Connie Brenton to start it, and he couldn’t have known how important that early decision would be – or the influence the department they created would have. Fawcett spoke about why he wanted an ops department and the early missteps he wishes he could have avoided, but from which he learned a great deal. The interview has been edited for length and style.
Continue Reading Why I Needed an Ops Department: The general counsel of NetApp explains what he was looking for

Based on my research, during the past five years at least 90 different U.S. organizations published reports based on 190 surveys of U.S. law firms or law departments. That plethora of legal-industry surveys addressed a wide swath of management data. An analysis of the topics finds that compensation, e-discovery and outside counsel cost control were frequent topics, but all manner of other data inquiries were also carried out. The sponsors were primarily publishers, vendors of software or services, bar associations and consultants. At least half a dozen law firms and several trade groups also launched surveys.
Continue Reading Surveying the Surveys: There are many in the legal world, and the quality is uneven

Susan Hackett is a law practice management and legal operations consultant; she founded her firm, Legal Executive Leadership, LLC, after serving for more than two decades as the general counsel of the Association of Corporate Counsel. One of her best known initiatives at ACC continues to occupy her in her current practice: promoting the use of value-based or alternative fee arrangements (AFAs) to make costs more predictable, transparent and aligned with the value of the legal services provided – for both firms and clients.  Her remarks have been edited for length and style.
Continue Reading Crafting the Right Fee Arrangements: The results and value of work should take precedence over time spent

Clifford Barr is assistant general counsel, litigation and human resources, for Marathon Petroleum Corporation. In October 2018, the company merged with Andeavor, an integrated marketing, logistics and petroleum refining company where Barr has worked for 13 years. His job there changed dramatically about two years ago, when the company hired Kim Rucker as its new general counsel. Rucker had previously been general counsel at Kraft, where there was an established legal operations group. 
Continue Reading Legal Ops 101 for Law Departments: Using key performance indicators and productivity tools to create better outcomes

Mike Dillon, the general counsel of Adobe Systems Inc., isn’t fond of the way many lawyers write. And it’s not just the legal briefs that are anything but. His dissatisfaction even extends to contracts like nondisclosure agreements. So, not long after he landed at the software company in 2012, he set out to do something about it. He thought there was no reason why NDAs had to be a half-dozen pages or longer. He believed they could be reduced to a single page. Taking a cue from our subject, this interview has been edited for length and style.
Continue Reading How We Stripped Down NDAs: Adobe’s GC wanted a nondisclosure agreement template that could be used without calling a lawyer

Nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) – also known as confidentiality agreements, confidential disclosure agreements and proprietary information agreements – are something most business leaders and attorneys deal with from time to time. However, few companies have formalized why, when and how NDAs should be used. Different people at the same organization may have very different approaches to using them, resulting in inconsistent protection of a company’s confidential information and potentially jeopardizing company trade secrets.
Continue Reading Everything You Wanted to Know About NDAs but Were Afraid to Disclose: When and why you need nondisclosure agreements and how to execute them