Does your lawyer understand your company's business strategy? Does your lawyer need to understand it? These may seem like unusual questions, but they are critical to your business's success. Put simply, your lawyer should understand your strategy. Why? Most importantly, your strategy is ...
Category Archives: Legally Informed Strategy
Entrepreneurs: Does Your Attorney Need To Understand Your Business?
Does your attorney need to understand your business? And if your business lawyer does not have a strong grasp of your business, does it matter? Yes, the answers matter for entrepreneurs. Some lawyers will say that they do not need to have a deep ...
Breaking Down The Silos That Separate Business People And Lawyers
In many companies, business and legal operate as separate silos. On the business side, there is business development, corporate development, marketing, finance, and human resources. On the legal side, there are in-house attorneys and outside counsel. Business sees legal as a cost ...
Why Strategy, Law, And Organization?
In this post, I advance a simple argument: A combined Strategy, Law, and Organization lens provides superior solutions to difficult business and legal problems. Good business lawyers understand that legal problems are necessarily business problems. Yet, understanding the law, by itself, is ...
Intellectual Property Rights, Merger And Acquisition Strategy, And Transaction Costs
Do the transaction costs of allocating intellectual property rights in collaborative R&D influence merger and acquisition strategy? When it is difficult to write intellectual property agreements, does it makes sense for managers to turn ...
Why Consult A Business Lawyer Early In A Business Transaction?
Business lawyers often argue that involving a lawyer early on in a transaction is cheaper than fixing a problem later. Clients sometimes want to negotiate a deal on their own and then have a lawyer write it up. The concern might be cost or the attorney's grasp of the business issues. Further, an attorney ...
Apple Acquires The “i-phone” Trademark In China
Apple has finally ended its iPhone trademark problem in China by acquiring the rights to the "i-phone" mark from Hanwang Technology. The acquisition ends a dangerous intellectual property and marketing situation for Apple. As I wrote in an earlier post, because ...
Survey Says: Lawyers Don’t Get Business
My last post asked whether greater value add would accompany higher hourly rates in 2010. It appears lawyers were not listening. Today's TexParte Blog summarized the results of a LexisNexis survey. And the results do not instill confidence that lawyers fully grasp the ...
Law Firms And Higher Hourly Rates: Where Is The Value Add?
An article in today's American Lawyer outlines a tug of war between law firms and legal departments over higher hourly rates in 2010. While law firms want to increase their hourly rates, corporate legal departments are pushing back. They want discounts up to ...
Strategic Implications of China’s Draft Regulations On Price Monopolies
China's Anti-Monopoly Law, implemented in August 2008, continues to take shape. The National Development and Reform Commission recently issued draft regulations regarding price monopolies. The proposed regulations apply to monopoly price activities both within and outside China, when the activities ...