John A. Lassey, a partner in Wadleigh, Starr & Peters, of Manchester, NH added a thoughtful comment to my post of March 12, 2006 about variable billing rates for the same lawyer, according to the usefulness of the lawyer’s task to the client. Perhaps assignment of different rates based upon…
Inside lawyers have very little individual incentive to reduce the amount paid to the law firms with which they work. It is a principal-agent clash (See my post of Jan. 16, 2006 on this concept; but see my post of Aug. 27, 2005 on Waste Management and its lawyers hewing…
Under the model rules of conduct, it is normally inappropriate for a law firm to allow its timekeepers to charge clients for time they put into preparing bills (See John W. Toothman and William G. Ross, Legal Fees: Law and Management 44 (2003) and its citation to Restatement (Third) The…
Bottomline Technologies, a vendor of a matter management plus e-billing system, takes a clear position on who should bear the cost of turnover within a law firm. According to the ACC Docket, May 2006 at 70, “If a lawyer leaves the firm, the firm must absorb the time incurred in…
In 2005, Bottomline Technologies surveyed the Fortune 1000 companies and AM Best 200 insurers. Of the 1,892 individuals sent e-mail invitations to participate, 200 responded (See my posts about the survey of November 15, 2005 on law firm performance data; November 15, 2005 on rating law department evaluations of firms;…
A unit billing arrangement is similar to a flat-fee arrangement but for a specific task rather than an entire matter (See my post of April 5, 2006 defining and contrasting fixed and flat fees.). For example each deposition could be billed at a set unit rate. Unit billing is best…
Alternative fee arrangements were the focus of the September 17, 2004 Web conference by Foley & Lardner. The conference summary reproduces a chart, without source, that gives by types of matters rates of taking up alternative fees. The least likely candidates included bankruptcy, benefits, regulatory, securities, other, and environmental. Slightly…
Frank McCormack, Head of Legal Services for Balfour Beatty, makes a point about “large projects” where competitors each seek legal representation (all I can imagine are lawsuits against an industry or several companies vying to buy one company). Commenting in Global Counsel, Sept. 2003 at 30, McCormack says that “we…
I quarrel with an off-hand comment by Ulrich Niessen, AXA Konzern’s general counsel, for Global Counsel, Sept. 2003 at 23. “No firms have yet offered us … on-line time recording, but we would find that very interesting. It would be much easier to check last week’s bills than those relating…
British Petroleum’s law department has identified 15 to 20 outside law firms as core to its legal business. According to Jim Neath, BP’s assistant general counsel litigation in Met. Corp. Counsel, Vol. 14, May 2006 at 64, that score of firms is paid the largest share of the company’s outside…