The Texas Lawyer, Vol. 21, Dec. 5, 2005 contains a long description of Pfizer’s P3 process (Pfizer Partnering Program) to select a panel of product liability litigation firms. One of the Pfizer lawyers commented that P3’s goal was to “totally eliminate subjectivity” from the process. The view was to “make…
When a law firm is selected to handle a large amount of legal work on a fixed fee, the firm has a wonderful opportunity to conform its internal management practices to the new situation. Yet we don’t hear about such rethinking and innovations in how firms staff fixed-fee matters, train…
“Across the country, firms have continued the aggressive pursuit of individual partners, groups of partners, and whole practice groups, sometimes offering substantial bonuses and other incentives to entice partners to relocate from competitive firms.” The Client Advisory, March 2007 of Hildebrandt and Citigroup Private Bank at 4, points out this…
The Client Advisory, March 2007 of Hildebrandt and Citigroup Private Bank at 2, concludes that cost control measures by law departments are having an effect. It discusses “declining realization rates among the 30 most profitable firms in the country and relatively flat realization rates among other firms.” The finding continued…
Just as associates who have high targets for billable hours ought to concern general counsel, so too should similar pressures on paralegals (See my post of Nov. 2, 2006 about percentages of firms that set 2,000 associate hours as the goal; Oct. 20, 2005 about whether law departments should ask…
Not only should law department managers lose a little sleep if their key law firms impose billable hour requirements on paralegals (See my post of March 9, 2007 on such requirements), they should also fret if the lawyers they retain do not make effective use of paralegals. The 2005 Utilization…
Mark Chandler, the general counsel of Cisco Systems, intoned this at Northwestern School of Law’s 34th Annual Securities Regulation Institute. Chandler thundered decline ahead for large US law firms, with their current business model, in part because their hoarding of legal information is doomed. He believes that “the networking of…
One way to combat the cost creep that comes from converging to large law firms is to look for smaller firms that join together to propose on work. So long as one of the firms assumes the lead role, the law department can get the best of all worlds: lower…
Data collected by Altman Weil, reported in InsideCounsel, Feb. 2007 at 58, pushes back at the prevailing sense that e-billing is sweeping through law departments. The piece does not explain the survey’s population, but only 13 percent of the law departments who responded use an “e-billing system allowing outside counsel…
For its “Management Report 2006,” Team Factors Ltd., working together with the Corporate Lawyers Association of New Zealand, collected data from 102 New Zealand corporations. In a summary of the report (at 7) appears this disturbing statement: “Only 21% of respondents considered their lead law firm ‘clearly better’ than its…