A fertile, fact-filed post in Joy London’s blog, Excited Utterances, profiles some date from ValueNotes’ 68-page report, “Offshoring Legal Services to India.” That report states “legal services offshoring from India generates $61 million in revenues …” and “employs around 1,800 Indian professionals.” [If that figure of $34,000 per professional holds…
Robert Walner, the general counsel of Grubb & Ellis, explained in 2003 that he had saved his previous employer “hundreds of thousands of dollars a year by hiring experienced paralegals rather than junior lawyers.” (Corp. Legal Times, Vol. 13, July 2003). He pointed out that paralegals in law firms face…
A participant at a Counsel to Counsel session, reported in Corp. Legal Times, Vol. 13, July 2003, stated that she had saved $200,000 a year in outside counsel costs on EEOC-related cases and complaints. Instead of paying outside counsel that amount to handle all the work, the “GC and her…
Inside Litigation, Winter 2006, describes much about Tyco International’s selection of Shook, Hardy & Bacon (SHB) as the company’s sole products-liability defense firm, including the arrangement’s extranet. “Tyco and SHB have sole access to a secure extranet where a variety of case information is posted and shared, such as the…
“Approximately 80 percent of patents granted represent improvements to products already in existence as opposed to inventions of wholly new products” (Economic Approaches to Intellectual Property: Policy, Litigation, and Management (NERA Econ. Consulting 2005, at 8). Later, “many patented inventions have relatively low values, while a few patented inventions have…
A recent survey by Gartner found that financial compliance management spending for IT will triple from 2004 (less than 5% of IT budgets) to 2006 (10-15% of IT budgets). I wonder whether legal spending on the same set of issues has jumped anything like this amount. The report makes the…
To the degree that a cost to a company of supporting its law department is understated, neither the company nor the law department can make decisions about investments in the department with as much accuracy as if the full expenditures were known. Several posts have explored the kinds of law-related…
An article on analysts’ estimates of Merck’s exposure from its Vioxx litigation (BusinessWeek, Dec. 5, 2005 at 40) explains why those figures have varied from $5 billion to $30 billion or more, and why they careen up or down depending on isolated events (e.g., FDA advisory panel votes, a court…
For each of its litigation cases, BellSouth’s law department tracks outside counsel spend plus resolution costs. The litigation group can analyze this “total cost to resolve” (TCR) by categories of cases, over time, and across law firms. (From Jan. 2005 materials of ACC provided at a conference organized by the…
Where law department budgets include outside counsel fees, and cost cutters are trampling out the vineyard where the grapes of costs are stored, a latent tension arises: a law department might be tempted to recommend a higher settlement than might otherwise be obtained, to lower its payments to firms and…