About $600 per year is the estimated cost of paper and ink for a typical employee printing 10,000 pages (6 cents per page). That figure comes from an article in the NY Times, July 5, 2009 at BU3, about GreenPrint, which sells software that makes it easy not to print…
If I were the head of strategic sourcing for a company, and I wanted to try to endear myself to the legal department, here are some tactics I would consider (See my post of March 1, 2008: procurement with 17 references.). These offers to help do not go to the…
My expectation that companies sue or are sued more during recessions found no support in a recent survey of 191 in-house senior legal attorneys. The LexisNexis CounselLink study, entitled “Effects of the Current Economic Downturn on U.S. Law Departments” 2009 at 8, shows the rank given 11 “effects of the…
Richard Susskind, a visionary of legal transformation, alerted me to his article in The Times. I quote his opening paragraphs: “In a ground-breaking move, Rio Tinto is announcing today that it is outsourcing its legal work to India — triggering what is predicted to be an irreversible trend in the…
If the outside counsel budget is your responsibility, currency fluctuations can hurt or help you. If your budget is denominated in dollars, for example, when the greenback falls, your fees paid to Euro-based firms climb. At least US firms negate currency fluctuations. Aside from the swings in budgets, foreign currency…
“It’s a fact of life that more law departments are being subjected to audits by internal auditing functions, particularly reviews of law department spending and budgets.” This assertion, proclaimed with no quantitative support, comes from an excellent article on e-billing in the ACC Docket, Vol. 27, May 2009 at 58.…
A brief comment in the ACC Docket, Vol. 27, May 2009 at 18, set me to thinking about audits of disbursements. A long article on e-billing cites Idearc (formerly Verizon Information Services) for its adoption of an online system for processing bills from outside counsel. “They were able to show…
Some metrics are available that tell us how frequently legal departments collect accrual data from their law firms. Not an accountant, my working definition of accruals are legal costs incurred but not paid by a fiscal-period cutoff date (See my post of Aug. 24, 2005: year-end accruals and their difficulties;…
From the 2008 ACC/Serengeti Managing Outside Counsel Survey, published in the ACC Docket, Vol. 27, May 2009 at 9, comes this finding: “[C]ounsel most frequently reduce bills for what they perceive as time not well spent for the following reasons (in decreasing order of priority): overstaffing at hearings/meetings, administrative work/filing/organization,…
Wired, June 2009 at 110, describes Google’s auction method, one which could apply to legal departments when they put work out to bid for a fixed fee. The winner of a competitive bid would be selected to do the work for one thousand dollars more (or some other pre-determined increment)…