Thanks to ongoing technological improvements to enterprise legal management software, in-house operations are more efficient than ever. Dan Ruderman of LexisNexis CounselLink has worked in this space for decades and has seen the ways the broad implementation of legal spend management systems have helped attorneys become more focused – and helped law departments bring down their overall costs. His remarks have been edited for length and style.
Continue Reading Improving Law Department Operations

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

Jeffrey Martin and Paul Mastrocola are co-chairs of the business litigation and dispute resolution group at Burns & Levinson. Both are seasoned trial attorneys who know that litigation is sometimes the only option – but certainly not in every case. They often advocate meditation, arbitration or other forms of alternative dispute resolution, always with the goal of efficient and cost-effective outcomes that satisfy all parties involved. The interview has been edited for length and style.
Continue Reading Finding the Optimal Path to Dispute Resolution

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

What do you think of when someone says Delaware? For many people, one word comes to mind: business. That’s where numerous companies are incorporated. If they didn’t already have “First State” on their license plate (Delaware was first to sign the U.S. Constitution), they could just print “The Business State” and people would know where they’re from. 
Continue Reading Civil Justice Playbook: Delaware’s Lawsuit Climate Gets Chillier

Data migration has reached a tipping point. The vast majority of technology decision-makers (84 percent) say that their organization invested in cloud services in 2016, according to Insight’s 2017 Intelligent Technology Index report. It noted that “while only 15 percent have fully migrated their corporate application workloads to public clouds, 47 percent are more than halfway implemented in the cloud, with large and medium companies leading the way.”
Continue Reading Now That Your Data’s in the Cloud, How Do You Get It Out?

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