A previous post mentioned the received wisdom that “70-80 percent of litigation costs are for discovery” (See my posts of Aug. 5, 2005 for the quote; Aug. 24, 2005 for estimates of pages per executive; and May 13, 2007 on the immensity of documents generated each year Most people may…
The McKinsey Quarterly, 2007 No. 2, at 23, defines what economists call “rents” – “additional earnings requiring no additional, marginal investment of capital or labor.” This blog has mentioned the term previously but briefly (See my posts of April 27, 2006 and its definition of rents as “excess profits”; and…
To calculate the cost to a company of its in-house lawyers, you need to include much more than base and bonus compensation (See my posts of Aug. 5, 2005; Oct. 18, 2005; and Jan. 6, 2006 on how to calculate the fully-loaded cost and what some of the missing elements…
An item in the Economist, July 7, 2007 at 74, explains that prices of goods and services depend heavily on local inputs such as rent and wages. Those inputs tend to be lower in poor countries. “For this reason PPP is a better guide to currency misalignments between countries at…
The most recent data on highly-compensated general counsel, from the blog of American Lawyer Media, covers 100 general counsel. Assume each of them logs a generous 2,000 hours of chargeable work per year (See my post of Sept. 25, 2005 on 1,850 as a normal assumption for in-house chargeable hours.).…
Airfares rack up by your law department’s travel or flights by outside counsel can reach hundreds of thousands of dollars. Fast Co., July/August 2007 at 58, points out two secrets to reduce those costs. The website of Yapta let’s law departments take advantage of an underused regulation called “guaranteed airfare…
Most law department managers, asked to submit a budget for the coming year, start from the previous year’s budget and tack on a percentage increase (See my posts of Oct. 20, 2005 on budgets cascaded down to practice groups; and Nov. 25, 2005 on top-down vs. bottoms-up budgets.). A more…
To explore the correlation between market capitalization – a company’s share price multiplied by the number of its shares outstanding – and total legal spend (inside budget of a law department plus its outside vendor costs), I gathered 2005 spending and staffing data on 35 large US companies (See my…
By contributing author Brad Blickstein, Blickstein Group, on legal service providers: Two interesting press releases crossed my desk last week, both related to non-traditional legal service providers offering document review services. EED appointed Terry Murphy, formerly of Kelly Law Registry, as VP of Review Services and Special Counsel added a…
Citi announced that it will “hive off a chunk of its London legal function to Belfast,” according to Legal Week, Vol. 9, May 24, 2007, at 1. On the order of 39 jobs will be based in Belfast. The huge bank, with more than 1,000 lawyers in its global legal…