At the start of their Martindale-Hubbell entry, many law firms parade some of their prominent clients – or that is the impression given. Yet all that those lists show are the names of the companies, so it is impossible to know whether for any one of them the work was…
I do not like this practice. The first law departments to deploy this weapon, back in the mid-to-late 80’s, may have gained some data and leverage, but later adopters ran into resistant law firms, overly-aggressive auditors, fewer egregious billing practices, a surfeit of poorly trained auditors trying hard to sell…
Law department managers ought to carefully refer to an arrangement with law firms as “virtual.” At least five variant applications have surfaced in this blog. Some in-house managers say it’s “virtual” when they put in-house lawyers and paralegals on a project team with an outside law firm and expect the…
Many law departments that are bedeviled by a swarm of lawsuits hire a single law firm to coordinate the defense. If cases are pending throughout the country, then the so-called national coordinating counsel will handle cases in jurisdictions where the firm has capable litigators who are admitted, and will turn…
“US general counsel have long utilized their position to stipulate certain pro bono demands along with hourly fees when appointing external counsel,” intones Michelle Madsen in Legal Week, Nov. 23, 2006 at 10. No, they haven’t. To my knowledge, no general counsel on this side of the Atlantic has ever…
If your law department wants to obtain a fixed-price bid for a large block of work, it must needs deal with large law firms. Those firms with, say, 800-plus lawyers can take on an entire portfolio of work. Massive firms can absorb more financial risk, they can deploy the specialist…
Most outside counsel guidelines devote a disproportionate amount of costs and energy to law firm disbursements, disproportionate because the out-of-pocket expenditures by law firms that clients pay for are typically less than ten percent of the total bill. That attention is misguided. “Show me the money” directs us properly to…
Once more into the lists I go, to joust with this knight-errant technique (See my posts of April 23, 2006 criticizing UTBMS codes; and May 1, 2006 on their decline in popularity.). The charger I ride now carries five favors (court ladies gave their valiant knights favors – handkerchiefs –…
By one definition, equity partners in a law firm (1) own some portion of the firm, share responsibility for its liabilities, and earn distributions that rise or fall with the earnings of the firm, (2) contribute capital to the firm, and (3) earn 70 percent or more of their income…
Mergers of companies with law departments change the mix of law firms retained. The change occurs only in part because the merged law department culls some firms. For many other reasons a remix of law firms that serve the company might result from a merger. Some of the reasons are…