The Big Picture

My husband showed me this video a few days ago. Take a look and make sure to count how many times the basketball gets passed between the players wearing white shirts.

So, did you see the gorilla ... or were you too busy counting the passes? Well, I didn't see it and that's because (1) I'm way down in the weeds sometimes and (2) I pay attention to instructions. What did it teach me - that I need to take a breath and look at the big picture at home and work. My 8 year old daughter saw the gorilla - but that's because her head is always in the clouds and she never listens to instructions!

The Greatest Advantage of In-House Counsel Work

What do you like most about being in-house counsel?

Rees Morrison at Law Department Management recently discussed to InsideCounsel's March 2010 survey:

What is the single greatest advantage of working as in-house counsel?

32.4% Work-life balance
24.5% Exposure to the business side
17.4% Variety of legal work
12.5% Working for one client
4.6% Job security
3.7% Management opportunities
1.8% Pay and benefits
1.6% Career advancement opportunities
1.5% My colleagues

In any survey, I tend to be most fascinated with the "meta" issues, like the survey format, the wording, the options not offered. For example, as Morrison notes, offering "variety" as an option but not "sophistication" implicitly assumes that sophisticated legal work remains the province of law firms.

All of the options are presented as positives. In other words, none of the options describes a problem of law firm life that we avoid as in-house counsel. If the survey options included "Don't have to track my life in six-minute increments" or "Not being judged by billable hours and collections", I suspect the results would be quite different.

Your Clients are Skeptical of You

Shamelessly lifting from two of my favorite dead-on posts about the behavior that makes business clients want to wring the necks of their corporate counsel:

From Dan Hull's wonderful What About Clients? blog, The 7 Habits of Highly Useless Corporate Lawyers. My favorite is #2: "Business clients are run by business people who take risks. They need to be managed, guided, stopped. Don't encourage them."

From Venture Hacks, Scott Walker's take on the "Top 10 Reasons Entrepreneurs Hate Lawyers." So much that rings true here, especially reason #5 - "Because they Spend Too Much Time on Insignificant Issues."

Resemble anyone you know? Business folks succeed by taking risks. Let's stop wringing our hands and focus on guiding clients to the smart risks.

Iron Man: The IP Movie

"Iron Man 2 is the most expensive movie ever made about an intellectual property dispute."

PowerPoint isn't evil...

When you move in-house, you quickly discover the popularity of PowerPoint in the corporate world. Or unpopularity, to be more accurate.

I don't know if I ever saw a PowerPoint when I was in private practice, except at CLE seminars. I certainly didn't have any PowerPoint skills myself.

Some days it seems like professionals are speaking different languages: lawyers speak Word, accountants speak Excel, and MBAs speak PowerPoint.

Effective presention skills are essential in business. Today's article in Slate, No More Bullet Points, No More Clip Art, is a good place to start.

Signs You're About To Get A Rather Large Bill From Outside Counsel

New owners acquired our company last year, and since then we've had a lot of changes. Most of the changes have been very positive for our business, but occasionally there are bumps in the road.

For example, a few months back I found out that a partner at our owners' go-to Big Law Firm had started working on a project for us. I contacted the partner and asked him his hourly rate.

He said he wasn't sure. I asked him to get back to me, but I never got an answer.

When a law firm partner doesn't know his billing rate, that's a pretty good sign that he doesn't come cheap.

Big Law Firm doesn't put their individual hourly rates on their invoices, but one month this partner was the only biller on a particular matter, so I was able to figure out what the firm charged for an hour of his time.

Yes, his hourly rate is quite high.

A New Low in Sports Metaphors

Sports metaphors pervade business-speak. Only War inspires inspires more awful analogies in the hallways of corporate America.

I heard a horrible new phrase yesterday: a vendor's salesperson told me to expect a revised contract draft "by end of play tomorrow".

I couldn't let that pass. I informed the vendor that "play" and "work" are complete opposites, play starts when work is over, and he should stick with the phrase "end of day" thank you very much.

If I ever catch myself using "end of play" when I mean of "end of the business day," then I'll know it's time to throw in the towel in my war against sports and military metaphors.