Most general counsel who profess to control their outside counsel costs admire rebates or discounted hourly rates (See my post of April 23, 2006 on rebates compared to discounts; Oct. 31, 2005 on British practices and low-balling; but see my post of Sept. 10, 2005 on the scarcity of discounts…
From a recent directory, the NJ Legal Almanac, Aug. 2006, I looked at size and location statistics for the 17 largest law firms based in New Jersey and the law departments of the 19 largest companies headquartered in New Jersey. The median percentage of lawyers at the firms who are…
According to the Wall St. J., June 13, 2006 at A3, one of the insurance companies covering Purdue Pharma’s defense of nearly 1,400 lawsuits over OxyContin, Purdue hired 40 law firms in 32 states to fight the claims. Perdue’s legal team included 322 partners, 849 associates and 1,023 paralegals. All…
Law firms dislike capped fees because under them they can charge their normal rates but may not exceed the cap. Much more favorable are fixed fees, because then the law firm receives the agree-to amount regardless of how efficiently it accomplishes the tasks or goal. A capped fee might be…
One often hears of law firms and their expectations of 2,000+ chargeable hours per year (See my post of Nov. 2, 2006 on the prevalence of this widely-circulated figure.). Such goals concern law departments because they suspect the efforts of associates to achieve that Herculean feat leads to lower quality…
With so-called tiered discounts, a law firm agrees to a step-wise volume discount off its standard rates. As fees paid the firm exceed one plateau after another, the discount rate rises for the new level. For example, a firm might propose a discount of five percent for the first $1.0…
Although it is useful for law department lawyers to evaluate the performance of the outside firms they manage, it often proves difficult to persuade them to complete the evaluations. At FMC Technologies, a lawyer can’t close a matter in the department’s matter management system without an evaluation of the matter’s…
Let’s parse some data about the number of law firms employed by law departments as the departments increase in size. The data comes from 2004 and 2005 and is in the 2006 Altman Weil Law Department Metrics Benchmarking Survey, published in partnership with LexisNexis Martindale-Hubble and reproduced in InsideCounsel, Nov.…
During May 2006, 162 readers of InsideCounsel completed a survey sponsored by a law firm, Butler Rubin, regarding alternative fee arrangements in litigation. As noted before (See my post of Sept. 17, 2006.), 40 percent of the respondents had zero experience with AFAs in litigation. Thus, as reported in InsideCounsel,…
Blended rates can take a number of forms: a single blended rate for all lawyers of a firm ($295 per lawyer), multiple blended rates based on lawyer titles or years of experience ($330 for partners and $260 for associates), or even blended rates by practice area ($310 for litigators; $360…