From Georgetown Law: Rees Morrison on the challenges facing in-house law departments (video interview)

Part of our coverage of “Law Firm Evolution:  Brave New World or Business As Usual?”, a conference held March 21-23, 2010 by the Georgetown Center for the Study of the Legal Profession.  For all our posts on the conference click here.

Reported by:  Gregory P Bufithis, Esq.    Founder,  ThePosseList.com and ProjectCounsel.com

Rees Morrison was not presenting at the conference but attending.  And as the guru of law department management with one of the most highly read online blogs Law Department Management (click here)  we requested an interview.  He is the eponymous founder of Rees Morrison Associates (RMA) which has for the past 20 years consulted solely to law departments: operational reviews, cost control, re-engineering, structure and organization assessments, client satisfaction, technology, benchmarking, and other issues.  Rees has assisted more than 250 law departments and he has written scores of articles that appeared across the legal media blogosphere. 

Before RMA, Morrison was a partner at Thomson/Hildebrandt for six years, Altman Weil for five years, and Arthur Andersen for four years, before which he served as the Consulting Assistant to the General Counsel of Merck. 

He is now running the largest general counsel metrics/global law department benchmarking ever undertaken (click here).

In this interview he talk about how legal department structures have changed in reaction to the economic downturn, the need to be more transparent about economics, and Web 2.0 effects on the legal industry: