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!

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.

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

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.

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

Traffic statistics show that some people are reading The In-House Blawg!

(To be precise, people are visting the Blawg. Unless I activate their webcam like Lower Merion School District, I don’t know if they are actually reading.)

We done very little marketing and promotion so far, as we need to find our voice and get a quality blawg going first. It’s good to know some people are finding us.

Normally, the Blawg is not for promoting seminars and such, but I’m posting the following for Renée Karibi-Whyte of Practical Law Company because it’s aimed an in-house and attorneys. And because I’m happy she found us:

The upheaval in the legal industry has created numerous opportunities for in-house law departments and their service providers. Gone is the zero sum game of the traditional service provider/client relationship, where some of the best known firms had an almost tangible sense of entitlement to the bet-the-company matters. In its place is a new type of environment; one where collaboration and mutual benefit are realistic and achievable for in-house counsel, law firms and other service providers.

On May 6th, Axiom & Practical Law Company invite you to join Trevor Faure, Global General Counsel, Ernst & Young, Andrew Felner, former Deputy General Counsel, Citigroup and other thought leaders as we explore how to get the most from the evolving relationships between corporate law departments and their outside legal providers. With real-life examples on how to best overcome typical areas of mistrust, you will gain practical tips & strategies for creating mutually beneficial, collaborative relationships at this complimentary seminar. NY & NJ CLE credits provided.

Please RSVP today to renee.karibi@practicallaw.com.

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Overcoming Mistrust as a Barrier to Collaboration:

Better Aligning the Incentives of Corporate Legal Departments with their Legal Service Providers
Thursday, May 6th
5:30 – 7:00pm

Vanderbilt Suites (MetLife Building, 2nd floor/Enter at 44th & Vanderbilt)
Panelists:

Trevor Faure, Global General Counsel, Ernst & Young
Andrew Felner, former Deputy General Counsel, Citigroup
Joe Armbrust, Jr., Partner, Sidley Austin
Mark Harris, Chief Legal Officer, Axiom
Bruce MacEwen, President, Adam Smith, Esq.

Moderator:

Karen Sheehan, Head of PLC Law Department

Really? You’re marking up my f***ing numerals? Wrongly, I might add? Don’t you have something better to do?

There’s an unwritten rule of lawyer collegiality in contract negotiation: you don’t request changes to the other lawyer’s writing style or grammar unless it’s demonstrably wrong, AND it creates a legal problem in the document.

If another lawyer wants to do the ugly, pointless write-out-the-number-with-English-letters-and-then-write-it-again-with-arabic-numerals-in-parentheses thing in her own document, that’s her business. Ugly and pointless, but I’d leave it alone.