Even with the pressure of bankruptcy filings bearing down on you, Todd Silberman highlights the importance of taking time away from the stress to regain focus and perspective.
Andrew Bos discusses the importance of using any and all resources that new to in-house attorneys have to learn about the company and clients in this ACC Docket article.
How are good compliance and due diligence programs the safeguard of a successful company? They protect against potential legal liability and financial hardship. They preserve the sanctity of a corporate reputation. There's another upside to this type of programming: done correctly, it can also cut company costs.
An extensive network of professional contacts is one of the greatest career assets a corporate attorney can have. Most lawyers work hard to establish contacts, particularly in the early stages of their careers, but over time, many misuse their networks or forget about them altogether. To prevent this from happening, in-house lawyers need to be sure to avoid the most common mistakes even seasoned attorneys can make when it comes to the care and feeding of their networks.
Given today's economic challenges, in-house counsel are forced to do more with less and have to watch the company’s bottom line, by approaching transactions, compliance matters and other legal projects with a practical and focused mind-set, befitting that of a project manager. Key project management skills can be adapted by in-house counsel to enhance efficiencies and improve results including team work, defining project goals and objectives, specifying tasks, identifying resource needs, developing budgets and timelines, and implementing controls to stay within a project's critical path. This session will discuss project management fundamentals and in-house counsel will explain how they have applied project management skills to their work. Practical tips and user-friendly techniques that attendees can immediately apply will be supplied.
This session focuses on small, privately held companies who are involved in building and maintaining an effective compliance program on a limited budget.
While the job market has been challenging lately, we have assembled a panel of in-house attorneys who successfully found great new positions in the past few months. Come hear how to survive being in-transition, stand out as a candidate in this competitive job market and make it over the wall to that next great job. Our panelists will share how they found their jobs, what worked (and didn't work) for them in their job search as well as some general advice for conducting an effective job search.
What strategies and resources are needed for developing a legal department? What do you do first to set up a legal function? How do you get a seat at the table and stay there? How do you communicate with management? How do you get your piece of the budget pie and how do you control your costs? What tools/resources do you need? Where can you go for help? Learn practical strategies and pointers from this panel of legal experts who focus on how to build and maintain a legal department.
Most law departments spend more on their outside legal counsel than on their internal costs and staffing, yet most of us also recognize that law firms bill their clients or set their fees in a manner that is both unpredictable and often apposite to efficiency and client value. The ACC Value Challenge project spent the last year learning more about best practices in cost/expense management, and we've created this program to help law departments and firms get a handle on better processes that can help control expenses and drive greater client value in both firms and departments. We'll examine alternative staffing models, data mining techniques that can help you understand what matters are worth, metrics that measure performance relative to cost, and much more.
Budget cuts, workforce reductions and increased litigation make it more important than ever to leverage technology so you can do more with less. This session will teach you how to optimize your existing resources through process improvement, system design, and effective training. Learn key strategies that will take your current matter management, entity management and electronic discovery technology into survival mode, and harness powerful metrics to demonstrate the value of the legal department when everything is on the line.