The 2009 Empsight/ACC Small Law Compensation Survey reports on 146 organizations that gave text responses to a question concerning the effects of the recession. As published in the ACC Docket, Nov. 2009 at 8, several points struck me. “Travel expenses were frequently cited as targets for reduction or elimination.” I…
Many law departments specify in their outside counsel guidelines that if a law firm anticipates an external expenditure above a certain amount — perhaps $10,000, such as for an expert witness or storage on servers, the law firm should have the vendor bill the law department directly. Whether those payments…
An article in Legal Tech. News, Vol. 16, Nov. 2009 at 39, describes the environmental efforts of a 40-person law firm. It adds several ideas, and quantifies some of their benefits, to my previous collection (See my post of March 11, 2009: conservation for law departments with 7 references; and…
Nearly all my posts about offshore legal resources relate to India. Still, I have mentioned similar undertakings in a number of other countries yet here is a new entrant: New Zealand (See my post of April 13, 2008: Malaysia and HSBC; Jan. 27, 2006: Mauritius and Accenture; Nov. 27, 2007:…
Posts before this one have dealt with the effects of a merger mostly in terms of law department headcount (See my post of Jan. 16, 2009: layoffs after mergers with 9 references.). Another post-method method by which companies squeeze out savings is to limit the surviving general counsel to a…
The International Chamber of Commerce studied the distribution of costs in arbitrations between arbitrator and institutional charges (hiring the judges) and lawyer fees, expenses related to witnesses and experts, and document charges (putting on the case). As reported in the NYSBA J., Vol. 81, Oct. 2009 at 21, in the…
Guest author Bob Unterberger sent me this item, which I edited slightly. The UK financial giant Lloyd’s Bank is close to buying CPA Global, one of India’s largest LPOs. The New York Times reports that Lloyd’s will purchase CPA Global for about $700M. Neither Lloyd’s or CPA Global have confirmed…
That quote comes from Don Liu, general counsel of Xerox, in David Galbenski, Unbound: How Entrepreneurship is Dramatically Transforming Legal Services Today (2009) at 37. His estimate seems high, but perhaps spending from the UK is included (See my post of Feb. 7, 2009: maybe 2% of companies send legal…
In the cottage industry that serves legal departments, full of small companies, a very few live in mansions. Those heavyweights are publicly-traded service providers. In that elite group, a handful provides a range of forensic, technological, and management consulting services. In this group are CRA International (Nasdaq: CRAI), FTI Consulting…
As posted on LawShucks, the National Law Journal learned from Microsoft GC Brad Smith that his law department’s budget was cut by 15 percent and head count by 5 percent. According to the piece, “[b]efore the cuts, the company’s legal department had a $900 million annual budget and 1,050 employees,…