Operations

Subscribe to Operations via RSS

Article by Alan R. Boynton, Jr. / McNees Wallace & Nurick LLC

The reality for almost every business is that not all of its employees are going to be happy in their jobs and that, at any given time, one or more is going to be seeking greener pastures. Many times those pastures are owned by competitors, and any business owner or CEO who fails to anticipate and plan for employee defections may also be inviting the loss of substantial business.Continue Reading Making a Federal Case Out of It: Now when trade secrets go walking out the door, employers have a new vehicle to try to get them back

By David Yurkerwich / Navigant

The Chinese intellectual property sector has been changing and growing for years, but few people would tell you so. The country has long been labeled as an IP rights violator and generally carries a bad reputation in its handling of copyrights. But Chinese companies are becoming more aggressive in building patent portfolios.Continue Reading New Risks – and 3 Tips – for Patent Holders in China: Chinese companies have aggressively grown their portfolios

Article by Sasko Markovski & Amy C. Cococcia / Fragomen

 

Australia has been next in line across a number of jurisdictions around the globe to announce significant changes to employer-based immigration programs. This article provides an overview of some of the key changes announced as well as guidance on what actions businesses should be taking where impacted.
Continue Reading What You Need to Know About Australia’s Visa Changes: The new rules are all about protecting jobs

Kevin Caulfield, a product line director at Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions, understands that general counsel don’t want their departments to be viewed solely as cost centers. Many of them strive to show how they can be good business partners with other parts of their organization by focusing on initiatives that will help reduce costs and generate revenue. To Caulfield, one of the ways this can be achieved is through enterprise legal management technology. Although many long-established corporate legal departments have already made good use of this technology, he says, there are many growing companies that still may not realize the benefits of an enterprise legal management solution. His remarks have been edited for length and style.
Continue Reading Is It Time to Automate? Eager to avoid being seen as cost centers, law departments are increasingly leveraging technology

Interview with Janet Langford Carrig / ConocoPhillips & Kimberly Simpson / National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD)

 From October 1 to 4 at the National Harbor in Maryland, the National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD) will hold its Global Board Leaders’ Summit. The event brings together some 1,500 board members and corporate executives, including general counsel, to discuss the hottest governance issues facing boardrooms today. Janet Langford Carrig, GC of ConocoPhillips, and NACD regional director Kimberly Simpson discuss why the event presents a unique learning and networking opportunity for general counsel and corporate directors alike. Their remarks have been edited for length and style.
Continue Reading GCs and Directors: Strategic Corporate Assets on Parallel Paths: A conference brings them together and points out common goals

Ransomware. Just the word itself is enough to chill the hearts of everyone from personal users to IT professionals to senior executives. May 12th’s massive attack took down hundreds, perhaps thousands, of companies and unknown numbers of individuals and institutions, including the United Kingdom’s healthcare systems (with possible impacts including critical patient care and historical medical records).
Continue Reading How to Protect Your Company from Ransomware Attacks

“Text mining” refers to software that can find patterns in text and extract meaning from them. It offers plenty of useful applications. For instance, law departments can benefit from text mining any time they collect a fair number of comments from surveys. I have used it myself for client projects.

Here’s how it might be useful for you. Let’s assume that a large number of your internal clients completed a satisfaction survey. One question was open-ended: “Overall, what would you like to say to the law department?” As a complement to coding those remarks by hand, text-mining software can spot commonly used words, classify the comment as favorable or unfavorable and even tease out thematic topics.Continue Reading Text Mining Can Help You Drill Down

Interview with Brian Bauer / PHENIX Investigations, Inc.

 

Brian Bauer, chief executive officer of PHENIX Investigations, Inc., took an unusual path to a career in corporate investigations. He didn’t come from a career in law enforcement, as so many investigators have. But his background helped him hone an approach that has served him well during his two decades in business. And it’s one that a lot of businesses would do well to emulate. It’s all about the clients. The interview has been edited for style and length.Continue Reading Corporate Investigations Made Easy: How one firm lets the clients call the shots

Interview with Frank A. Segall and Scott H. Moskol /Burns & Levinson 

Frank A. Segall and Scott H. Moskol co-chair the cannabis business advisory group at Burns & Levinson, where they have built an unusual practice helping individuals and companies involved in the marijuana industry navigate the complex and rapidly changing legal and business environment. MCC talked to them about the growth and opportunities in this new area of the law. The interview was edited for style and length.Continue Reading Growing Their Own: How one firm is working to bring the cannabis business into the mainstream

By Kristin Calve, publisher of Metropolitan Corporate Counsel

Last week, as I headed out to CLOC’s 2017 Institute, I had to wonder what to expect. In my many years in legal media, I’ve been to my fair number of events ­– but never to one for legal operations professionals. My husband (and our company’s co-founder), Joe Calve, interviewed Jeff Franke before the show, so I had a good sense of what the CLOC team hoped to achieve. Franke’s interview basically called for nothing short of a revolution!

This event – only the second annual meeting in the organization’s history – would bring together groups of people who have long been excluded and told, “No, we cannot do it that way.” Jeff Franke made it clear that he, Connie Brenton and Mary O’Carroll have decided not to wait for change to come. They are aiming high and working to make it happen now. So the real question as I headed out to Las Vegas was: Can they pull this off?

I spent most of my time at the Institute in sessions and talking to legal operations professional from all over the country. There were so many sessions it was difficult to…
Continue Reading Going All-In on Legal Operations with CLOC