MOTO LEGL 2.0

November 17, 2005 | Filed Under Tactics, New Services

Yesterday, a view of the last five years in the life of the Motorola legal department–raising revenues, lowering legal spending, and taking a RAZR to its roster of law firms.

Today, an idea about how managing partners could position their firms to “make the cut” in this new (law) world order. Here’s what you do:

1. Hold an event: an off-site brainstorming session that divides attendees into groups of 4 or 5 lawyers (include one associate in each group–and that means a few new ones).

2. Have a goal: increase firm profits (and profit sharing) over the next five years.

3. Tweak the scenario: you can’t increase hourly rates or billable targets during that period.

Serve good food and relevant spirits. Stand back and see what happens. (A rope course is optional; but a firewalk would be cool).

Each member of the group with the best idea as voted by all attendees gets one of these credit tickets that apply to their billable hours-to-date.

lotto-city

Take the top 6 ideas–and implement one a month starting the Monday after the event.

MOTO LEGL

November 16, 2005 | Filed Under Offshore Services, Managing

UK publication The Lawyer has an interesting profile of Motorola’s legal department and its GC, Peter Lawson.

The article puts in concrete terms the staffing and budget constraints a GC faces on a daily basis.

While Motorola quarterly earnings are at record levels, since 2000 the legal department is apparently half the size it was then. Total legal spending and the number of outside firms used are also down by half.

Motorola has also decreased sharply the spending on pursuing and maintaining its IP portfolio. One of the tools is employing Indian firms for some of the early-stage work.

Mr. Lawson puts complex issues into a clear focus:

“Like any commercial business, we’re under a lot of pressure to reduce costs,” Lawson states matter-of-factly.

Tomorrow, a brief lesson for managing partners who want their firms to continue to make the cut.

Going Mobile and Keeping Secrets

November 15, 2005 | Filed Under General

This week on T3 a brief look at the prevalence of mobile devices and the lawyer’s obligation to preserve client information.

News.com reports that over one-third of laptop computers and cell phones do not have security measures installed or activated. As more lawyers ditch the laptop for enhanced cellphones or PDAs, the chance that they will be lost or misplaced is greatly increased.

Some companies are recognizing the risk, and taking a venerable term from the takeover era–poison pill–and applying it to tech. This brand of poison pill would allow a firm’s IT department to send a signal to a lost or stolen mobile device and wipe the data clean. Let’s hope it’s backed up first and not think about what damage the “rogue IT guy” could do with this.

We have come a long way from the early days of legal tech when commentators and ethics opinions examined whether e-mail used by lawyers must be encrypted.

But now rather than over-caution we may be taking business tech casual a bit too far. Many lawyers face a daily threat that confidential information could be compromised, and have relatively easy means to safeguard it.

What’s in your (digital) wallet?

Resist the Cease-and-Desist?

November 14, 2005 | Filed Under Tactics, In the News

Just because you have in-house attorneys, doesn’t mean you should always use them.

According to The Day in New London CT (ed: reg req after 1 day, bah!) , Subway had its attorneys lob a legal Meatball Marinara at an alleged competitor, unintentionally enhancing their quarry’s business in the process:

Upstart Steakways of Milford, a family sandwich shop focusing on beef, pork and chicken, can thank the international behemoth Subway for generating interest and new customers. Subway, meanwhile, appears to have confused its own position in the market by groveling in turf where no war existed. Seems to me the legal department has too much free time on its hands.

The brouhaha began last month when the Subway legal department sent a cease-and-desist letter to Steakways. “Steakways,” corporate attorney Valerie Pochron wrote, “is confusingly similar to … Subway … and maybe [sic]” a trademark infringement.

As the owner of Steakways noted,

“I’m getting a lot of activity on this,” said Brian Bowser, who launched Steakways with his father. “I can’t understand how this is a threat to 2,600 stores in 81 countries.”

(ed: It’s actually 24,648 stores in 82 countries).

Then there’s the obligatory quote from the “local expert”:

“Subway couldn’t have been a better advocate for more business for Steakways,” said Michael London, a Trumbull-based marketing and public relations consultant. “It would have been nearly impossible for a small business like Steakways to get national media attention. Subway made it happen. It would have been smarter for Subway to ignore this business. No one would have cared.”

When news outlets picked up on the story, Subway seems to have circled the wagons and refused comment. The media love a David and Goliath (or Jared) type of story. It’s not easy, but you have to think about your fundamental legal position and how these things will play in the press before you dash off the initial C&D.

Perhaps Subway should fly a flag of surrender.

For the record, I dine at Subway, and am partial to the new Turkey Wrap (which goes very well with bag-in-a-box Chardonnay).