Operations

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Interview with Alisa McLellan / Inventus

Alisa McLellan, a licensed attorney, is the director of project management for the Chicago and New York offices at Inventus. She and her team work with inside and outside counsel to manage large data-collection projects for both litigation and internal investigations. In this interview, Alisa shares strategies for managing highly effective and cost efficient e-discovery initiatives. Her remarks have been edited for length and style.Continue Reading How You Could Be Using Metrics in E-Discovery: General counsel now have the ability to get more involved in the process

By Jason Mark Anderman / American Express Company

What if you and your counterparty possessed 100 percent certainty that every word and every signature in every contract you’ve negotiated were perfectly accurate? What if every payment obligation could be automatically enforced without human involvement? What if you could stack contractual duties in condition-precedent dominoes so that you automatically paid a supplier fee only after valid confirmation of goods delivery?

This is no fantasy. It’s the world offered by smart contracts today.Continue Reading Blockchain for Lawyers: New technology has changed the capabilities of documents once done with paper and pen

Interview with Linda Hovanec / Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions

Linda Hovanec is a senior director in product management, global business intelligence and analytics at Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions. Lately, she has been devoting a good deal of time to studying law departments’ billing processes. A recent survey that ELM Solutions collaborated on revealed that companies aren’t all that happy with the billing guidelines they use to manage their law firms, and they aren’t doing very much to make them better. As Hovanec sees it, they’re missing a big opportunity to simultaneously strengthen their guidelines and enforcement, while also improving their relationships with their law firms. Her remarks have been edited for style and length.Continue Reading What Law Departments Need to Know About Billing Guidelines: A survey suggests that many departments have plenty of questions and concerns

Interview with A. Carter Arey / McGuireWoods

A. Carter Arey is a senior counsel at McGuireWoods who co-leads the firm’s ClientSync team. Her focus is on legal project management (LPM), which is designed to help the lawyers deliver what their corporate clients want: quality legal services, pricing and predictability that they can understand and plan around. The interview has been edited for length and style.Continue Reading Giving General Counsel Pricing Predictability: How one firm is honing a process and proprietary technology to deliver accurate estimates

By Rees Morrison/Altman Weil, Inc.

Day after day, managers confront operational problems, think about them and make choices about what to do or not to do. In other words, they decide something. But they don’t always take into account the data available to them when they make those decisions.Continue Reading Data Should Drive Decisions: It can help counter conscious or unconscious bias

By Joe Calve

The Association of Corporate Counsel has released a broad new survey, “Global Perspectives: ACC In-House Trends Report,” focused on issues that have a direct impact on the professional lives of corporate counsel. Almost 2,000 in-house lawyers across 53 countries participated, including 81 percent who are ACC members, 31 percent who work outside the U.S. and 28 percent who are the top legal executive (GC or CLO) in their company.

Some of the trends identified, especially in the section on in-house legal/business priorities, are “painfully obvious,” as ACC puts it. Compliance, regulatory and cybersecurity continue to top the list of in-house concerns and, as ACC reports, are driving law departments to divert resources their way.Continue Reading Backstory: Happy Campers, Happy Feet

Christine Coats has made bringing new speed and efficiency to legal operations the focus of her career. After an early stint with IBM, she became Director of Legal Operations at Symantec in 2005, at a time when the function barely existed. At Symantec, she acted as the general counsel’s chief of staff and ran business operations for the COO’s office. In 2015 she was hired as Vice President of Legal Operations at an even larger software company – Oracle Corporation – where she acts as the general counsel’s right hand. She also serves as the CFO of the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC). The interview has been edited for length and style.
Continue Reading The GC’s Right Hand: A legal ops trailblazer found her way when there was no trail. Now she helps others find theirs.

Article by: Kyle Reykalin / FRONTEO

Conducting cost-effective and efficient e-discovery for Foreign Corrupt Practices Act investigations involving U.S. and Japanese companies requires a rare combination of legal, cultural and technological skills. Here are seven common obstacles, and practical tips to help e-discovery teams overcome them.

1. Bridge dissimilar legal systems. It’s important to understand the differences between the two legal systems. Japanese in-house counsel are often surprised at the scope, expense and formality of the American discovery process, as well as the danger that their confidential business documents and strategies might be shared. American attorneys occasionally assume that the in-house legal departments of large Japanese corporations are familiar with uniquely American legal concepts, such as attorney-client privilege. Care must be taken to clearly explain the requirements of confidentiality, electronically stored information collection, the obligations of legal hold and other discovery concepts.Continue Reading Seven Tips for Handling E-Discovery in Cross-Border FCPA Investigations: Dealing with two languages more than doubles the complexity

Article by: Charlie Platt / iDiscovery Solutions

I’ve written on this topic before, and despite the danger of sounding like a broken record, I will repeat myself: Cybersecurity is all about risk management. Many of you are likely working with your company’s chief information security officer (CISO) and security teams to help assess and control this cyberrisk. (At least I hope you are.) And one of the first things most security professionals recommend is taking an inventory of your IT assets. In fact, it’s embodied in the first Function of the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework:

“The activities in the Identify Function are foundational for effective use of the Framework. Understanding the business context, the resources that support critical functions, and the related cybersecurity risks enables an organization to focus and prioritize its efforts, consistent with its risk management strategy and business needs. Examples of outcome Categories within this Function include: Asset Management; Business Environment; Governance; Risk Assessment; and Risk Management Strategy.”Continue Reading Are You Accounting for One of Your Largest Cybersecurity Risks?

Interview with Scott Lefton/AccessData

Scott Lefton is a senior sales engineer at AccessData. Though he is not directly involved in conducting or supervising investigations, he spends a lot of time talking to the people who do, including chief security officers, people in HR and, of course, in-house lawyers. He listens to their “woes,” he said, and suggests software designed to help them. His remarks have been edited for length and style. Continue Reading For Internal Investigations, Technology is Playing Catch-up with Technology: Companies focus on hackers and data, and sometimes overlook inside threats