Ed Poll, writing on his blog, Law Biz Blog, parts ways with me about value based billings (See my post of Nov. 11, 2007 on how hard it is to set a value on many legal services.): “Rees Morrison observed, “Certainly no law firm can hazard more than a guess…
If you ask a large law firm that hasn’t worked with your department before to handle a small, one-off matter, the firm may ask you to waive in advance your rights to conflict that firm out of other matters. The firm does not want to have the itsy-bitsy matter block…
One general counsel I have worked with suspects that e-billing systems make it very easy for lawyers to click a box next to a bill and thereby discharge their responsibility to actually review the bill. In the old days, when there was a hefty paper bill in front of a…
If your law department has outside counsel guidelines (See my post of Aug. 1, 2006.), you will find that many law firms negotiate revisions or supplements to your terms. You need to keep track of those variations in a central database. Furthermore, from time to time you may negotiate special…
As I wrote about recent efforts to rank law firms, both by groups of law departments and individual departments (See my post of Nov. 19, 2007.), my thoughts went to an alternative method: shared, blind ratings of work product. For example, what if 10 law departments each volunteered a recent…
Patrick Hurley, Vice President of the LEDES Oversight Committee sent me the quoted material below. I urge law department readers to take a few minutes and complete the survey. “Last year, the LEDES Oversight Committee (LOC) surveyed over 120 law firms regarding the submission of electronic invoices and the back-and-forth…
A friend of mine, Andrew Shipley, Assistant General Counsel – Litigation with Northrop-Grumman, wrote regarding my comments about setting minimum experience levels for associates (See my post of Nov. 8, 2005.). I quote him below. ‘The issue raises an interesting dilemma. Clients don’t want to pay the high price for…
InsideCounsel, Nov. 2007 at 4, explains that its revised website, InsideCounsel.com 2.0 will “allow in-house lawyers to rank the firms they use based on 10 different factors, including “value of service,” “responsiveness” and “billing accuracy”. However, law departments won’t find out the overall results until the October 2008 issue. To…
Law departments have not lacked for ingenuity when asking law firms to provide services beyond legal advice (See my posts of June 28, 2006 on added-value services – IT support, access to work product, CLE, secondees, extranets, recruitment, and contract tracking; July 21, 2005 with a higher-level listing; and Feb.…
A previous post presented a recent study’s findings on hourly billing’s strengths (See my post of Nov.11, 2007.). The same study, by Commerce & Industry (C&I) and BDO Stoy Hayward, gathered from 171 UK law departments their views on the drawbacks of hourly billing by law firms. Here are their…