The Bigfork Blog
Web-Based Contract Management: The Evolution From Teenage Angst To High School Graduation
Over the past few weeks, social media posts about senior pranks, and college plans, and scholarship awards, and military commitments, and trade school admissions, and gap years, and prom dresses, and new jobs, have forced me to focus on the great accomplishments of the children of our friends and family members as they graduate from […]
Keep Reading3 Easy ways to improve in-house legal workflow
We’ve all heard the tips and read the trends about how in-house lawyers should be managing their legal work: more and more are bringing work in-house; law firms are forced to offer value or hybrid billing; legal ops professionals are critical for making in-house departments more efficient; standard processes should be systematized; routine contracts should […]
Keep ReadingHow Contract Management Is Like Herding Toddlers
Remember the scene in Cheaper by the Dozen where the frog gets loose on the breakfast table and all twelve kids and both parents destroy the entire kitchen trying to catch the frog? You can refresh your recollection of the complete chaos that ensues here. I am often reminded how contract management is like herding toddlers […]
Keep ReadingLegal Project Management – A Method For Saving Your Sanity
It’s late Friday afternoon, you’re watching a stream of colleagues leave the building for a team-building happy hour activity, and there you sit, with a thousand unfinished items on your to-do list that were supposed to be done by close of business. You’re used to this, of course, because you work in legal and legal […]
Keep ReadingLaw Project Management Software Makes Spring Cleaning Easy
Ever get to the end of the Quarter and notice your legal ops need a little “spring cleaning?” Maybe you’re not sure if every contract was actually signed and filed. Or, that dispute files were docketed and updated. Or, that management reports were created and submitted. Or, that employment investigations were finalized. If you answer […]
Keep ReadingLegal Operations is not an accident
Legal Operations is not an accident. For at least the last decade, in house legal teams have been told to bring more work in-house while their overall budgets have been cut. The ‘do more with less’ mantra has become so ingrained in our minds that it’s now taken for granted that we annually examine our […]
Keep ReadingIn-house: How to Measure Success
One of the great things about being in-house is that we don’t have billable hours but then how do you measure success. Not tracking our time in 6-minute increments means we can spread our focus to things that don’t always have a direct connection to the bottom line. However, we can also be seen as […]
Keep ReadingPolicy: Know Your Players
One of the biggest lessons I learned as an in-house counsel is that if you want to make good policy, you need to know your players and influencers who can get you to your goal. For more than ten years, as executive vice president, general counsel, and corporate secretary of GoDaddy.com, I had the incredible […]
Keep ReadingPolicy: Know Your Audience
When we first started to focus on policy development at Go Daddy, the company was quite small and there was no corporate history to review to determine what approach the company had taken in the past. Instead, the management team left it to me as in-house counsel to determine what needed to be done. They […]
Keep ReadingDo the Right Thing and You will Succeed.
Do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do. Before he became Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, Jon Leibowitz served as one of the Commissioners of the FTC. I had the good fortune to meet with him and his incredible staff attorneys from time to time, mostly to advocate for policies that […]
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