About Devin S. Morgan

I am an attorney who manages attorneys. More importantly, I understand how to leverage lawyers through process, support staff, and tools that are integrated into your business and you ultimately control. I know the secret of great corporate legal departments and the sooner you implement those secrets the better. You will be able to control your legal spending while getting great legal support that is focused on what matters to your business. So, what is my story?

• I have built or re-built the legal and intellectual property management functions of half-a-dozen companies, including site-specific functions for two multi-billion dollar technology companies
• I have worked in the legal industry for more than 15 years, including with international law firms with over 900 attorneys, small intellectual property and technology boutiques, growth technology companies, and a Forbes Company of the Year
• I have Ivy League credentials, multiple advanced degrees, bar admissions in New York, Massachusetts, Washington D.C., and Virginia, and I am a registered U.S. Patent Attorney. But a great deal of money has been wasted on hiring blue chip credentials.  The bottom-line is that I guarantee that you will be satisfied with my work or your money back.
   

My Story
I started in the legal industry at a small IP boutique in Rochester, then a regional IP firm in Chicago, then the K Street office of an international behemoth with over 900 world-class attorneys, then a premier Silicon Valley technology firm. Each place, I saw great lawyers working hard. We put everything we had into each issue that came in front of us. We gave the best legal advice money could buy. But time and again, I saw end results (even wins) that were expensive, disappointing, and didn’t really move the business forward.

A cold reality set in that lawyers are a necessary evil for most businesses.

• They are a cost (potentially a large one)
• They don’t generate revenue
• No customer wishes your product or service came with more lawyers
• Once pointed at a problem, lawyers’ zero risk tolerance could lead to bizarre results
• As careful advisors (without decision-making authority), they require valuable time and attention from senior executives and other key staff (in addition to lots of money)

Growth businesses were particularly bad at using lawyers strategically. They had the money to hire the best lawyer for the job, but had no idea how to manage them. I once heard an analogy that a good lawyer is like a really expensive tool that you only use once a year, but it really does the job when you need it. Technology companies were ending up with a shed full of tools that they pulled out every weekend (and they had apparently lost all of the user manuals).

So, I started my own business to join forces with strategy consultants focused on helping people navigate the expensive world of intellectual property management. We could at least point them toward better management practices, make sure they were asking the right questions about their IP investments, and perhaps even provide data and strategies to rationalize their decision-making. We did some good, but we mostly ended up at large companies where business unit managers, corporate executives, and the legal department would wrangle over our findings and I have little confidence that much ever changed. My favorite projects we did were setting up the in-house IP management functions for a growth technology company (that ironically sold legal compliance software) and an internal training program to help employees of an energy company to safeguard IP and identify potential issues (without involving lawyers). It became clear to me that meaningful change for any organization needs to come from within.

When I got an opportunity to join a large technology company to setup legal operations for one of their business units, I jumped at it. It turned out to be more than setting up operations in one site. I needed to figure out how to break loose and distribute legal functions that had been concentrated in a single attorney’s hands for years (and were a bit of a mystery to the rest of the organization). We had doubled the size of the IP Team by the time the merger with our largest competitor was announced. I was the only attorney from my company to survive the merger and now had to rebuild site operations to be compatible with a new legal department. Not only was the integration a success, but the experience put me in charge of an initiate to further streamline process and improve cross-site information sharing in the IP Team. But change is difficult for large organizations and other life decisions ultimately lead me to head back out on my own.

This lead me to an additional insight, there is a sweet spot for setting up great legal management. The company has to be big enough to have resources and a real need. But if you wait too long, retrofitting is painful. In particular, once you turn the legal function over to an in-house attorney, you will end up with an attorney-centric system that may not serve the best interests of the business. That said, you will still be better off than relying solely on outside counsel to direct your legal strategy and operations.

Now, I help high-growth companies take control of their legal issues and transition from expensive legal firefighting to strategic legal management—to save them time, money, and worry so they can focus on the more important parts of growing their business. By removing distractions, I can help you grow.