We are edging toward a singularity, a major inflection point caused by three trends: (1) law departments shed junior lawyers, calculate fully the hourly costs of the remaining senior lawyers, and find the costs are north of $250 an hour; (2) law departments migrate more work to regional law firms…
These ideas are not new, but I like being able to cite specific law departments and their actions. An April 6, 2009 posting by the ABA Journal reports that PetSmart is asking its law firms to discount their hourly fees by 30 percent. General counsel Scott Crozier told the National…
I define unbundling as law departments removing from law firms tasks commonly handled by them and instead retaining specialists to handle the tasks. Examples abound on this blog (See my post of May 14, 2005: photocopying; Jan. 28, 2007: medical/nurse analysts; April 9, 2006: contract and temporary staff; Jan. 16,…
According to the ABA Journal on April 9th, a hedge fund based in the United Kingdom has just raised $47 million that may now be invested in commercial litigation cases in the United States. “Juridica Investments Limited helps fund only major commercial litigation, and was behind 17 large cases, mostly…
A presenter at a recent conference, David McCann, the President and CEO of DataconEED, described a major study his company has done of more than 200 lawsuits and the electronic discovery they unleashed. The study extracted some 15 key factors for each case, including about half of them related to…
This blog has many posts about patent litigation and the costs of patent litigation (See my post of Oct. 2, 2008: costs of patent litigation, with 13 references.) so it surprised me that “The annual median damages award since 1995 has remained fairly consistent, when adjusted for inflation.” This finding,…
One of the most pernicious problems about budgeting is that people feel pressure to inflate what they ask for because they expect the person who reviews the rollup of budgets to deflate them. This is the problem of budget padding. Additionally, particularly as the year draws to an end, some…
A slide presented at a recent conference was entitled “The US corporate legal services market generates $96B per year in spending.” Its pie chart had two slices (See my post of Feb. 26, 2008: estimates total US law department expenditures.): the larger, “Spending on Outside Counsel,” at $64 billion; and…
P.J. Thomas of Corplo Legal Outsourcing wrote me with an interesting point about layoffs of associates as a possible threat to the legal offshoring industry. “There is a school of thought in the offshore industry in India which believes that the law firms would ultimately turn to the laid off…
In this final posting in a five-part series on cost-effective compliance, Jeff Kaplan examines staffing issues. A critical component in maintaining an effective compliance program is expertise, and for some companies – particularly large ones in regulated areas – there is no substitute for bringing a true compliance expert in…