To increase accountability for cost reductions, general counsel should assign portions of the overall external budget to the chief lawyers for business units or legal specialties, such as litigation and labor/employment. With a cascade of responsibility for reducing costs down one level, more lawyers will have a personal stake in…
People have sung the praises of this idea for a while, but it deserves an encore. Law firms that pride themselves on swinging the wrecking ball of litigation find it difficult to tickle the fancy of the opponent with the sweet talk of settlement. A stance that privileges prompt and…
Law departments, ugly-duckling cost centers, sometimes dream of molting into swan profit centers. One way is through collecting royalties from patents improperly used by other companies. The New York Times (Oct. 4, 2005 at C8) discussed expert witness firms, such as the giants LECG and Exponent, that assist law departments…
Multiply the number of in-house lawyers in your department by a presumed 1,800 chargeable hours per year. Other hours of work are administrative or CLE or of a kind that an outside lawyer would not bill. If a lawyer left or joined during the year, adjust the number to come…
A thoughtful review of British legal technology in LegalIT (Oct. 11, 2005) cites Hammonds Direct. Hammonds, a large British firm, combined online technology and process engineering in the conveyancing (real estate) market to dominate that market with banks and other lending institutions. The article distinguishes commodity legal work that law…
It’s a simple statement, “The law department will reduce its budget by six percent.” It may be far more complicated, however, to allocate that overall budget reduction to specific business units or specialty functions. For example, if outside counsel spending must drop by $800,000, how do you know whether it…
The Wall Street Journal mentioned three law departments using lawyers in India: DuPont for drafting patent applications, Roamware for creating a contracts compliance database, and DirectoryM for researching litigation matters. For the last two, as compared to the costs US firms would have charged, the offshore lawyers’ costs were approximately…
Ex pat packages – extra supplements for lawyers who move to a foreign location – can double, or more, the cost of stationing a lawyer out of his or her native country. Those costs may be so high that an opportunity for professional development is not affordable by the law…
Previous posts have discussed several pots of spending that may or may not be included in a law department’s total budget. (July 20 lists several of them and Sept. 4, 2005 praises TLS as a percentage of revenue for its pre-eminent role.) One outflow pertains to spending on insured matters.…
How much money do in-house litigators direct? Consider that they account for, very approximately, one in ten lawyers in departments that spend roughly $600,000 in outside counsel fees per lawyer – with about half of those dollars going for litigation. Taking those figures together, the lone litigator in a ten…