So wrote English lawyer David Allen Green in the Financial Times the other day to conclude his op-ed on how to cut legal costs: “The best way for a business to manage legal costs is to be clear about what it wants from lawyers and to force them to be clear about…
Collaboration — on a consistent basis at least — calls for more than good intentions. Real teamwork is promoted — or it’s discouraged — by the way we pay people for their work. In her “What Makes Minnesota’s Mayo Clinic Different?”, financial journalist Maggie Mahar interviewed one of its…
In Part 1 I described how the Mayo Clinic simultaneously achieved both the highest clinical standards and robust new efficiencies in its heart surgery department. In looking to the Mayo Clinic for ideas on how to better manage the work that lawyers do for our businesses, I’d like to look…
Last year the Wall Street Journal recounted how — eight years earlier — the Mayo Clinic’s heart surgeons had asked for two more operating rooms to meet skyrocketing demand. “No” – replied the Mayo Clinic’s CEO — himself a physician. Not only did he say “No” — CEO Dr. John Noseworthy then…
I’m back from a hiatus in my blogging after two months of traveling back East on family medical and elder care duties. This blog, like my law practice, remains focused on a dilemma faced by business owners and executives: How to manage legal and regulatory exposure where your attorneys (outside…
Some times a character test presents itself in the guise of a legal question. And when that character test presents itself it’s the duty of general management — not their lawyers — to decide with wisdom and discernment. Because — except where there is an actual violation of law or…