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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

Greg Morical, vice president, general counsel and secretary of Calumet Specialty Products Partners, L.P., and Tabitha Meier, partner and co-chair of the compliance team at Barnes & Thornburg LLP, discuss the various ways outside counsel can help companies get their compliance programs up to snuff.Continue Reading Creating a Culture of Compliance

Work within the law department goes way beyond strictly legal matters. According to Aaron Pierce of CounselLink, information related to that work can be invaluable in optimizing your team’s performance. In this interview with CCBJ, Pierce, an industry veteran, provides insights on how to broaden data capture and analysis to improve performance.
Continue Reading Venture Beyond Legal in Tracking In-House Data

Nathan Cemenska, director of legal operations and industry insights at Wolters Kluwer’s ELM Solutions, says that complex billing guidelines coupled with the mounting workloads of in-house professionals erodes the effectiveness of e-billing solutions. Here, he provides some useful advice on maximizing e-billing ROI without dumping more work on law departments already slammed with too much to do. 
Continue Reading E-Billing Is No Panacea for Law Departments 

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

DISH’s Mike Burg partnered with iDS’s Dan Regard to build a document repository that allows the legal department to be more consistent across matters and leverage previous decisions on repetitive documents.​

CCBJ: Mike, please describe some of the issues that have been on your radar since you joined DISH.  

Mike Burg:  I’ve been managing e-discovery at DISH just about five years. Currently, we’re focused on becoming more efficient and leveraging technology to
Continue Reading The First Stop for IP E-Discovery

Transparency and collaboration are obvious keys to strong and smooth relationships between inside and outside counsel. Less obvious is the role budgets can play in facilitating such relationships. Here, Jared Applegate of Barnes & Thornburg and Justin Ergler of GlaxoSmithKline share best practices on using budgets as a conversational tool to build better relationships.
Continue Reading Budgets as Conversational Touchstones