Ken Crutchfield, vice president and general manager of Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory U.S., talks about the shifting role of the legal department, the importance of tailoring your conversations to your audience, and how general counsel can use metrics and key performance indicators to help a company meet its business goals.
Continue Reading Redefining In-House Counsel As a Driver of Value
Barnes & Thornburg’s Jared Applegate discusses challenges and ideas for gathering and using data.
CCBJ: Both law firms and in-house law departments look to gain pricing certainty from a better understanding of data related to matters. What type of data should be focused upon?
Jared Applegate: From an in-house law department perspective and, frankly, from a law firm perspective, I think you always want to start with the end in mind. Ask these questions: At the end of the day, what business decisions will be driven by the capture and analysis of the data? Will that ultimately provide greater value/insights to my business unit leaders?
Continue Reading Capture Pricing Data with the End in Mind
Kris Satkunas of LexisNexis CounselLink talks about the increasing prevalence of “maturity models,” and how companies can take full advantage of the insights and efficiencies they provide.
Continue Reading A Maturity Model with a Difference – Achieving Decision-Making Excellence
When I got back from CLOC last month, I was amazed at the various roles and responsibilities shouldered by legal operations staff. Still one of the fastest growing roles in legal departments, the responsibilities often assigned to these teams are varied and all over the map in terms of impact on the business, not just the legal department.
Continue Reading The Ever-Increasing Responsibilities of Legal Operations Staff
Jonah Paransky of Wolters Kluwer’s ELM Solutions explains how law departments will deliver value with operational rigor. His remarks have been edited for length and style.
CCBJ: How has the corporate legal department’s role expanded beyond its traditional responsibilities?
Jonah Paransky: There are several key items worthy of notice. The first is there’s been a sea change in expectations for how corporate legal departments will operate.
Continue Reading Corporate Law Departments, Expected To Be More Like Other Units, Face a Sea Change
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
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