A Legal Week/EJ Legal Big Question survey of 100 senior UK-based partners found rampant discounting, which the British refer to as “low-balling.” “In addition, more than two thirds of lawyers (67%) admitted to ‘sometimes’ doing work at unprofitable rates.” (Legal Week, Vol. 7, Sept. 22, 2005 at 4.) I have…
Progressive law departments charge back to a business or staff unit all costs of external counsel incurred on behalf of the unit. Sharing the pain is supposed to impose some market discipline on outside spending. But if often doesn’t. One reason is that the executive getting the chargeback didn’t cause…
In a 2005 survey, the Open Compliance & Ethics Group (OECG) collected extensive data on how 79 companies structured and funded their compliance and ethics programs. The OECG report shows total average costs of compliance and ethics processes over the period 2000 to 2004, broken into six categories. “Legal-External” and…
According to Fulbright & Jaworski’s Second Annual Litigation Trends Survey (2005, at 10), of the large company’s matters that started trials, 40 percent went to verdict. In other words, 60 percent settled during the trial, which is obviously after the parties have climbed the courthouse steps. A previous post (May…
Law departments in the US and UK should pore over the findings from Fulbright & Jaworski’s Second Annual Litigation Trends Survey, which is based on 304 US and 50 UK interviews or survey responses. I reviewed the 32-page summary report and the 126-page full report. Notwithstanding my appreciation for the…
The General Counsel of FMC Technologies, Jeffrey Carr, explained that his department negotiates a budget with the primary litigation firm, but allows the firm to retain local counsel as it deems appropriate, without that local counsel separately billing FMC (ACCA Docket, Jan. 2001) (See my post on July 16, 2005…
“[B]ig law firms have horrible diseconomies of scale – firms with 150 or more lawyers typically have overhead $70,000 higher per lawyer than firms with 20 or fewer lawyers.” This metric came from a book based on extensive interviews ten years ago of Chicago lawyers, “Urban Lawyers: The New Social…
I previously wrote about legal systems where the losing side pays the costs of the winning side (May 31, 2005 post). An article by Herb Kritzer, a professor of political science and law at the Univ. of Wisconsin (Legalaffairs, Nov./Dec. 2005 at 20), dissects some of the downsides of this…
John McGuckin, the General Counsel of Union Bank of California, pondering the relationship of compliance and law (Corp. Legal Times, Oct. 2005 at 78), made a statement about e-mail’s legal risks that goes to the heart of what law departments should communicate in writing: “A compliance process that generates e-mail…
The key idea behind Attenex’s six-dimension framework is that e-discovery production should be proportionate to the needs of the case. A law department should look at (1) the value of the case in monetary and non-monetary terms; (2) the size of the effort, which includes the number of custodians, pages…