In a previous career as a practicing lawyer, I once spent 20 hours looking for a very specific precedent. After days of looking for a needle in a haystack I wasn’t sure existed, I actually found it and put it in my brief. A couple of months later, the judge kicked the case out of court and specifically stated it was because of the case I found. My boss was thrilled.

Continue Reading Are Minimum Annual Billing Requirements Causing Spikes in EOY Legal Spend?

Rick Ralston, CEO of Contract Logix, observes the digital transformation that companies have been experiencing, as well as how the lack of support from in-house legal departments on these digital transformation strategies is affecting CLOs and GCs.
Continue Reading Why In-House Legal’s Digital Transformation Starts with Your Contracts

In a piece from ACC Docket, Roel Staes, Senior VP and General Counsel of FedEx Express, does a nifty job of laying out his 8 golden rules for effective communication by telling a story about how he broke the first rule: “Do not speak unless you have something to say.” He was a newly minted senior executive — “proud to be around the big kids without adult supervision,” as he puts it — when the most senior executive at a meeting dropped a bomb in his lap.
Continue Reading What One GC Learned About the Situation in Russia

Michael Vernick, government contracts partner with Akin Gump, discusses various aspects of the False Claims Act, including the potential for increased enforcement activity under the Biden administration, especially actions related to the CARES Act, and how companies and institutions can mitigate whistleblower and compliance related risks.
Continue Reading The Expanding Scope of False Claims Enforcement Activity

According to Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Legal and Compliance, the level of digital maturity for most law departments is shockingly low. Gartner, a leading IT research and advisory company however, goes further and drills down to identify three critical opportunities for senior in-house leaders eager to rectify the situation: establishing (or strengthening) foundational systems of record; enabling core workflows with digital investments (beyond sending emails or excel spreadsheets); and transitioning largely analog risk management methodologies to digital.
Continue Reading Gartner to Law Departments: Begin with Digital Basics

In a piece from Joe Patrice, senior editor with Above the Law, outside counsel guidelines are forcing law firms to waste oodles of time on “meaningless make work.” Citing Aderant’s recently released “Law Firm Leader Survey on Outside Counsel Guidelines,” Patrice says that while the whole report is worth checking out, the outside counsel guideline issue can be summed in a short list of challenges respondents said they face in managing OCGs:
Continue Reading Outside Counsel Guidelines’ TLDR Challenge

Jonathan Solomon, principal with Fish & Richardson, discusses the state of the cryptocurrency industry – what kinds of technologies his clients are looking to patent, the challenges of obtaining patent protection in this area, and where he sees the industry heading in the future.
Continue Reading Patent Protection for Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain Technology