It costs money for employees to find and organize documents that may be responsive to discovery requests; it costs to have employees prepare for depositions and be deposed; it costs to have inside lawyers manage litigation. Yet no one, as far as I know, has tried to quantify these and…
Josh Lerner studied the patent awards and lawsuits of 530 companies based in Middlesex County Massachusetts during Jan. 1990 and June 1994. He found among these companies that “approximately 6 patent suits are filed for each 100 corporate patent awards.” In reaching this estimate, he noted that companies generally litigate…
A publication by Moore in 2001 states that only 5 percent of patent lawsuits reach a verdict, “which the 1996 AIPLA estimate of median litigation costs [out-of-pocket only] cites at $1.2 million.” Another 49 percent of cases were dropped before the start of discovery (!), which cases presumably cost relatively…
The study of knowledge management techniques discussed in my recent posting followed a research methodology I wish someone could duplicate with outside counsel cost-control methods. Ask a varied group of corporate counsel about cost reduction methods they have used recently, then use the list that produces in a survey of…
The general counsel of Agrium, a CDN $2.5 billion Calgary-based company, explained at a conference that his company faced some huge lawsuits. To involve his clients in the litigation and to inject project management skills, he obtained from the client a “business manager.” That person was responsible for assisting with…
An article by Michael Ross in GC Mid-Atlantic (Feb. 2005 at pg. 11) described what some law departments have obtained from the law firms that survived a convergence culling. He cites corporate law departments that have negotiated for “reports on legislative and regulatory developments, periodic revisions to forms and manuals,…
Beyond lawyering, law firms provide many other services which could be handled by specialist vendors. Photocopying, making travel arrangements, proofing documents, conducting online legal research, digesting transcripts, building intranets, running law libraries, scanning and coding documents, preparing medical reports, producing trail graphics, researching jury responses, all these ancillary services could…
Some executive search firms provide compensation data for in-house counsel. They gather it mostly from candidates, partly from surveys, and sometimes from clients. Since the executive search firms receive as their fee a percentage of the first-years’ compensation of the lawyers they place, the firms would favor higher compensation figures…
Many companies, trying to control overhead costs, have hired a big-name consulting firm, such as McKinsey or Bain, to review their so-called administrative cost structure. The large consulting firm sweeps into its analysis of the law department and produces simplistic but harsh metrics regarding legal cost to be cut and…
General counsel have a hard time synchronizing their outside counsel spend to their company’s fiscal years. That spend lags the company’s calendar when a costly law suit erupts years after the events that triggered it; spend leads the company when a potential acquisition, for example, requires expensive counsel fees. In…