An undetermined number of legal departments live rent free. That is, the companies the departments serve do not charge the legal budget with a cost for the offices, hallways, conferences rooms and facilities space the lawyers and staff occupy. If the law department gets off scot free, or if the…
This stunning admission comes from J. Alberto Gonzalez-Pita, general counsel of the Las Vegas Sands Corp. His impression is that many C-Suiters think general counsel “just sit around and write checks all the time – and very expensive checks with very large billing rates to very expensive outside lawyers.” His…
Michelle Banks, the general counsel of The Gap Inc. summarized at a recent panel four cost-management steps she has taken lately. I quote from the ACC Docket, Vol. 30, Dec. 2008 at 27. The Gap is “asking its outside firms to provide staffing plans and budgets and increasingly holding them…
JDS Uniphase explains in its Guidelines For Professional Service Providers that Its Legal Department creates an Annual Operating Plan. The plan tracks “well over 200 separate line items and forecasts spending on them each quarter.” That budget is immensely detailed, since two that I have written about had only 40-50…
Data on payments made for legal resolutions such as damages, settlements, and fines are difficult to obtain (See my post of Dec. 17, 2008: settlements with 26 references cited.). Let’s call them collectively “legal resolution costs.” What would be useful to know is a typical balance between total legal spending…
I could retire if I had a dollar for every time someone mentions “bet-the-company” litigation (See my post of Feb. 28, 2006: bet-the-company litigation, rare but often cited.). So, with some satisfaction, I pored over the chart in the ACC Docket, Vol. 26, Nov. 2008 at 62, which graphs 18…
“All too often at many companies, the costs of judgments and settlements are allocated to, and divided between, several corporate departments, therefore diluted effectively enough to relieve everyone of all responsibility or accountability for the total economic impact.” A hard charge laid by Joseph Speelman in the ACC Docket, Vol.…
An article in Corp. Counsel, Vol.16, Jan. 2008, at A2, describes a world that should frighten general counsel: aggressive investors capitalizing massive lawsuits as business ventures. For example, the article mentions briefly a public company listed on the UK’s AIM exchange. “Its sole business is funding litigation.” The article further…
A general counsel may countenance offshoring because if promises cost savings. The literature that promotes legal process outsourcing (LPO) speaks of costs being 50 percent or less to provide similar services. That advantage may have been true, and may still hold for some LPO offerings. But according to strategy +…
Not every law department operates under a single cost center. For example, some law departments have a separate cost center for the Corporate Secretary function or indeed for other functions that report to the general counsel, such as government affairs, EH&S, or compliance (See my post of Sept. 3, 2008:…