The 2005 Hildebrandt Law Department Survey reports the figure of $192 per hour per lawyer, fully loaded. You can do several things with your own number. You can look at the blended hourly rates of your outside counsel and match them to the fully-loaded cost of your inside lawyers, (See…
An article in GC New York, Nov. 14, 2005 at 13, 21 explaining the term “fixed (flat) fees” gave examples only of phases in a specific law suit, such as $25,000 for discovery. It defined a “retainer” as where the client “engages the firm to handle all litigation for an…
Bob Peahl, VP Claims Litigation Management of AIG, spoke at ACC’s 2005 Annual Meeting. To set the stage for his talk on law-firm performance management, he stated that in North America, property and casualty claims relied on 2,000 law firms and 34,000 timekeepers. This army, together with 5,000 AIG claims…
Motorola “has outsourced its in-house patent-generating work to small Indian firms,” according to an article in The Lawyer, Oct. 31, 2005. (See my post of Nov.13, 2005 on Motorola previously re-configuring its in-house patent group.) A piece on the website of OutsourcingCenter (May 2005) l mentioned some other Indian providers…
For 12 months starting in 1992, a team of nine Dow Chemical employees analyzed each of the company’s 30,000 patents. The team, which almost certainly included a patent lawyer, determined “whether the technology was being practiced and whether it had potential business use.” By the end, from abandoning certain patents,…
A British food manufacturer, RHM, with annual sales of more than £1.5 billion ($2.6 billion) recently reviewed its legal advisors and selected a four-firm panel (Legal Week, Vol. 7, Oct. 27, 2005 at 3). If it were a US company of that size and industry, RHM’s total legal spend would…
A previous post opined on open cubicles for lawyers (See my post of Feb. 20, 2005.), so I was glad to read about the law department at SEI Investment Co. and its completely mobile desks, which lock into place with casters (GC Mid-Atlantic, Oct. 2005 at 25). What really caught…
Lawyers are called ex pats (from the Latin, ex patria, from one’s country) when they are transferred from their home country to practice law in an office in a foreign country (See my posts of Oct. 10, 2005 on costs and April 27, 2005 on second languages required for Kodak…
A previous post described the reluctance some prestigious clients have to push their primary law firms to reduce costs. Don’t big companies wield big clout? William Ohlemeyer, Altria’s litigation chief (Corp. Counsel, Vol. 12, Nov. 2005 at 92), bursts that bubble. “There’s been a misconception, especially in the last five…
Casemaker is an online legal research program provided free to lawyer-members of Consortium states. Each member bar shares its library with all the other members’ bars. “The goal of Casemaker is to take care of 90% of lawyers’ research needs 90% of the time.” For more information, see the Georgia…