The maintenance costs of equipment in a law department can amount to significant sums. Here is a comment from the administrator of a very large government law office. “Normally, we spend $750,000 on equipment each year. That includes everything from computers to digital senders to faxes to copiers and we’re…
Very roughly, fully-loaded inside lawyers in the US cost their companies about $200 an hour as a fixed cost. As roughly, the effective rate paid outside counsel reaches about $300 an hour, a premium in the vicinity of 50 percent for that variable service (See my posts of Nov. 16,…
Compensation makes up three quarters of the typical inside budget of a US law department, so the fully-loaded cost of the lawyers in a given law department is a result mostly of paychecks. According to Bus. Law Today, Vol. 17, Jan./Feb. 2008 at 6, data from Hildebrandt’s 2007 Law Department…
For most matters where outside counsel have been retained, the disbursements of the firms cluster around 10 percent of their total billings. At the same time, of the total outside spending by a law department, roughly seven or eight percent of it goes to service providers other than law firms…
Cal. Mgt. Rev., Vol. 49, Summer 2007 at 56, has an article about strategic sourcing of services. It makes a thoughtful point about law department’s bidding work to law firms (See my post of May 21, 2007 on bids compared to auctions.). “While a competitive bid sourcing process can provide…
Cal. Mgt. Rev., Vol. 49, Summer 2007 at 44, has an article about how procurement’s next frontier is managing the supply of services. Figure 1 (at 46) puts legal spending at about 90 percent outsourced and about 15 percent of that is “controlled by formal supply management.” As compared to…
I seem to be running across quite a few problematic sentences and paragraphs. This one, from an advertisement supplement by EMC2 in Corp. Counsel, Vol.15, Jan. 2008, after 50, set scratching my head: “The costs and risks of eDiscovery (sic) can be dramatic, with the average cost of a case…
After litigation under some statutes, the prevailing side is entitled to recover the fees of its attorneys. A small body of substantive law has developed around the rights of in-house lawyers to recover attorney’s fees. My crude understanding is that sometimes, if inside lawyers are to recover their costs, a…
A large bone of contention between law firms and the law departments that they serve, when there are outside counsel guidelines, is the travel policy. For what kinds of trips or lawyers is first class or business class available? (See my post of Sept. 5, 2007 for thoughts on whether…
“A comparison of the rise in law firm billing rates over two or three decades with the Consumer Price Index (CPI) shows that hourly rates have consistently increased by approximately twice the CPI.” This provocative statement, from GC Mid-Atlantic, Sept. 2007 at 16, gave me pause. It seems plausible to…