Nestlé, with 250 lawyers worldwide, “has a matrix of legal departments covering 52 countries,” according to the Financial Times report, “Innovative Lawyers 2009,” dated Oct. 23, 2009 at 33. The report says that the legal team “has set up centres of skill and scale, where premium, specialist work is carried…
A report from BNA, HR Department Benchmarks and Analysis 2008, pronounced that “Outsourcing of HR functions has become a widespread practice. Three out of four employers have outsourced one or more HR activities. The single most important motivation for HR outsourcing is access to greater expertise, although for the largest…
An article in Met. Corp. Counsel, Vol. 17, Dec. 2009 at 28, covers the usual points about an Indian-based legal process outsourcer. The particular company is Bodhi Global Services, yet even so the interview of its CEO, Arihant Patni,turns up a few points that stood out for me. One point…
An article in LTN Law Tech. News, Vol. 16, Dec. 2009 at 47, describes some of the various efforts of “the light bulb guy.” He is Alexander Tait at the Sonnenschein law firm atait@sonnenschein.com and he writes engagingly about his crusade to reduce the amount of power the 700-lawyer firm…
Hildebrandt, a unit of Thomson Reuters, released some data on cost control strategies from its 2009 Law Department Survey. Not exactly bold steps taken by general counsel. Reducing travel expenditures tops the list of 18 measures tracked in the survey as the most widely implemented cost savings strategy among law…
Procurement professionals may chafe at legal budgets: huge, scattered and opaque, wide variability, ad hoc decisions on retentions of firms, abysmal metrics, and generally a deplorable lack of discipline. Other than that, what legal spends conforms perfectly to model sourcing stratagems. But if sourcing experts step onto the field of…
“It’s a range [of damages] of about 5 percent, one standard deviation from the mean.” That statement comes from Jeff Carr, FMC’s general counsel, whose database of litigation outcomes shows how consistently outcomes converge around a similar amount. The quote comes from Litigation 2009, Fall 2009 at 101. It is…
In 2005 there were approximately twenty offshore legal-service providers, according to David Galbenski, Unbound: How Entrepreneurship is Dramatically Transforming Legal Services Today (2009) at 138. “Two years later, in the spring of 2007, there were sixty legal-service companies ready to perform legal outsourcing work. Today, there are over one hundred…
“America’s 1,000 largest corporations spend more than $60 billion, or 50 percent of their total legal operating budgets on average, to prepare documents for litigation, which is the single largest legal operating expense for most corporations. The growth of electronically stored information, which is the key driver of this expense,…
Marshall Grossman, a partner at Bingham McCutcheon, is quoted in Litigation 2009, Fall 2009 at 30. He perceives that clients in these malignant economic times may be more reluctant to start lawsuits because of the expense. But, if sued “they are much more anxious to litigate and defer settlement consideration…