Outside Counsel Guidelines (OCGS) are commonly used these days, but comprehensive and clear guidelines are hardly universal. In this piece from Corporate Counsel Business Journal, Brenda Hansen, a senior consultant with Epiq who has drafted many OCGs, offers useful advice for developing effective guidelines. Continue Reading The Care & Feeding of OCGs

In this piece from Corporate Counsel Business Journal, Todd Purdy, VP of Epiq, discusses “myth-busting” data points derived from his experience with e-discovery review teams in the U.S. and India. “When you approach a vendor for managed review of documents for litigation or an investigation, every single one will tell you they have the best people,” Purdy says. “But if everyone has the best people, how do you know what sets service providers apart for you, your firm or company, and your specific need?” From there he trots out four myth busters to use in evaluating a landscape populated by what are, by and large, temp workers: 
 

  • Career Growth. “A Managed Review vendor who is sensitive to the needs of the rank-and-file reviewers will have a program in place for training reviewers for higher level tasks and management skills. More importantly, it will have ongoing
  • Continue Reading The Humanity of the Managed Review Temp

    In this piece from Corporate Counsel Business Journal, two academics, Rick Burton, the David B. Falk Professor of Sport Management at Syracuse University, and Norm O’Reilly, dean of the Graduate School of Business at the University of Maine, discuss their book, Business the NHL Way: Lessons from the Fastest Game on Ice. Their goal, O’Reilly says, was to look at the National Hockey League and see what they could learn from a sport that’s had “unbridled business success” and share their insights with the broader business world. “One of the things that makes Norm and me interesting as academicians, and also as authors,” says Burton, “is that we’ve actually lived out in the business world that we write about. Norm is a partner in a thriving agency in Canada called T1, and I was the commissioner of a professional basketball league in Australia as well as the chief marketing officer of the US Olympic Committee for the Beijing Summer Olympics.” That’s why, they say, their work is akin to Moneyball, Michael Lewis’ bestsellers about data analytics and baseball, and allowed them to draw general business lesson from topics such as the permissive stance toward violence on the ice to the

    Continue Reading Lessons from the Bruising Business of Hockey

    In this piece, HBR Consulting focuses on two sources, its 2022 Law Department Survey and its Sounding Board series, which reflects data from more than 200 corporations, to conclude that in-house law departments, which had been sanguine about increases in headcount, spending, and tech investment throughout 2022, are far less optimistic heading into the new year.
    Continue Reading Reversal of Fortune