Well, it’s time for the last “Ten Things” blog of 2019.  It’s been a pretty good year for the blog: it passed five years of “bloggership” and is approaching 4,000 subscribers, it was named one of the Top Thirty Legal Blogs by SimplyLegal, the post on “How to Read a Contract” was the most popular article of 2019 on InCounsel Weekly, and the ABA published the second “Ten Things” book.  It will be hard…

I do a lot of coaching of in-house lawyers and one question I am often asked is “should I look for a new job?”  From experience, I understand that deciding to look for a new position is one of the hardest decisions an in-house lawyer has to make.  There are many articles discussing moving from law firms to in-house and vice versa, but few – if any – on the decision that most frequently faces…

It’s a nice, cool late October morning, the time of year when the shadows grow darker and longer and “spooky” stuff lurks around every corner.  You’re at your desk sipping some coffee and checking emails when a new one comes in from Sarah, the CIO, marked “Urgent.”  She says that she received a letter from some outfit called the Business Software Alliance asking the company to conduct an audit of its use of “Company X”…

If you’ve been an in-house lawyer long enough you know that one thing as inevitable as taxes, death, and another Fast and the Furious movie is meetings.  Lots and lots of meetings.  Meetings you set, meetings you’re invited to, meetings with the boss, meetings as the boss, status meetings, “kick-off” meetings, post-mortem meetings, meetings with law firms, meetings about all the damn meetings you’re having, meetings… well, you get the point.  Some days you look…

I recently heard from someone I worked with when I was General Counsel of Travelocity.  She was on the business side and worked on a lot of contracts.  She reached out because she remembered an article I had written and posted on the legal department intranet site about “how to read contracts.”  It was something I wrote for the business so they would be better prepared to work with my team on contracts.  Apparently, she…

Well, it’s that time of year again.  Every August for the last several years I have devoted a “Ten Things” blog post to talking about super useful technology for in-house lawyers.  Fortunately, there is always more cool tech to talk about and this year is no different.  That said, if you want to go back and revisit some of the past cool tech blogs click here (2016, 2017, 2018).  The ground…