According to one animal expert, business analogies have gone to the dogs and all those hackneyed expressions are just execs barking up the wrong tree — especially where there's an 800-pound gorilla involved.

Richard Conniff, a veritable Dr. Doolittle, has walked and talked enough with the animals to know that the folks in the board room have it all wrong.

In an article in Smithsonian magazine, Conniff promotes his new book, The Ape in the Corner Office: Understanding the Office Beast in All of Us , by debunking the most beastly of business metaphors.

A gorilla, Conniff says, tops out at 400 pounds and rather than a vicious predator, gorillas are happy with a lovely vegetarian spread — not really what the boss is looking for when directing someone to be the 800-pound gorilla in the room.

"I once worked on a TV documentary about lowland gorillas," Conniff says. "On an average day, the dramatic episodes consisted of the alpha male passing gas, picking his nose and yawning.... This is probably not the image a hard-charging executive wants to present to the public."

While Calliope and her sisters may have moved artists in centuries past, some New York painters today are finding that the thoroughly modern muse is money.

According to The New York Times, Novo Arts is cashing in on the demand for corporate art by hiring artists to create the ultimate installation pieces — paintings made to order for corporate offices.

Novo Arts founder Marlaina Deppe started turning capitalism into an art form in the late '80s, when she says corporate art budgets were cut even as corporate offices expanded. However, Deppe says she didn't really start hawking the idea until the recent economic downturn.

Today Deppe's clients include the Bank of America and the Dutch publishing company VNU. Already Novo Arts has produced 285 pieces for VNU's 600,000 square-foot building. However, the cost has only been about $760,000 — compared to the roughly $2 million to $3 million Deppes says it would have cost to commission or collect fine art.

"Companies get unique pieces of artwork," says Keith Rosen, whose architecture firm uses Novo Arts regularly — "not necessarily investment quality, but they're very well presented and geared to the project."

Lawyers — once averse to attacking their own — are getting in on the litigious lifestyle by following suit and filing suit against other lawyers in a growing number of legal malpractice cases, the Chicago Tribune reports.

"When a big scandal occurs, the trend now is for board directors to see whether some big law firm handling its legal work may be to blame," says Stephen van Wert, of Brown & Brown, a firm that provides malpractice coverage.

In fact, malpractice claims against lawyers and law firms have become so common in recent years that many firms are appointing a partner to handle malpractice cases. One recent studied cited by the Tribune found that 69 percent of the country's largest firms have a partner devoted to this area.

While lawyers may be biting their nails over the specter of turnabout becoming fair play, one law professor thinks malpractice suits are good for the profession and will encourage more ethical behavior.

What's good for the public is good for the private, or so the sentiment is among some private companies that are taking it on themselves to comply with the provisions of Sarbanes-Oxley, according to U.S. News & World Report .

In fact, PricewaterhouseCoopers recently found that 27 percent of fast-growing private companies are making a point of complying with Sarbanes-Oxley's reporting guidelines.

One exec whose private company is following the letter of the law says that he's looking to the future.

"We wanted flexibility in case the company eventually goes public or is acquired by a public company," says Gregory Stevens, CAO of Spheris, a privately held $200-million medical technology firm.

However the cost of compliance is a concern for smaller companies. For example, Spheris is spending roughly $100,000 a year on consultants to make sure they're in line.

That's why experts advise only companies that are serious about growing — and potentially going public — to take on the task of compliance.

While lawyers might be among the few who could afford Rolling Stones tickets should the band hit the road again, it seems that even with their triple-digit salaries, the high-paid lawyer set still can't get no satisfaction in their lives.

According to a recent study by a Texas Tech University School of Law professor, lawyers are ready to cut their hours to go in search of a life outside the firm.

Specifically, the study found that roughly two-thirds of law-firm lawyers say they are making sacrifices in their personal lives in order to get ahead at work. Further, 41 percent of corporate lawyers said they'd be willing to take a pay cut in order to spend fewer hours on the clock.

In total, 70 percent said they had problems managing their health and fitness, their family and their household because of work.

To nix the high-pay/low satisfaction ratio, Professor Susan Saab Fortney suggests changes in the way firms do business, such as adopting "family-inclusive events and the use of flex time."

If U.S. jobs are being outsourced to India, where are Indian jobs being outsourced? To the United States, of course.

In an ironic twist of economic plot-thickening, the very firms in India that have made millions off of luring U.S. jobs to their country are now in need of a little outside assistance of their own, according to U.S. News & World report .

Tata Consulting Services and Wipro Technologies — among others — are finding that in order to meet the needs of their Western clients, they need Westerners who can help them figure out what their clients need and how to deliver.

"Higher-level consulting services are very relationship-based," says Ron Hira, coauthor of Outsourcing America, "so it makes sense that they're hiring more Americans."

However, despite the outsourcing shift, the number of Americans brought on by Indian firms is unlikely ever to reach the expected 3.3 million Indian jobs created by American firms' outsourcing.

Putting the genie back in the bottle is no easy task and neither is getting American business types to go back in the box. But, according to business strategist Douglas Rushkoff, the box is exactly where U.S. companies need to be if they are going to be able to make meaningful improvements.

"American companies are obsessed with window dressing," according to Rushkoff, "... afraid to look at whatever it is they really do and evaluate it from the inside out."

In his new book, Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out , Rushkoff criticizes the out-of-the-box mentality for distracting companies from what's right in front of them: their product.

Specifically, Rushkoff cites a CEO he worked with who wanted to rework the company marketing strategy to be more grassroots. The real problem, Rushkoff says, was that the company had stopped focusing on the quality of its product.

"Look at your company as an opportunity to do the thing you are best at, rather than looking at it as something you are building to sell," he says.