A provocative law review article, Lester Brickman, “The Market for Contingent Fee-Financed Tort Litigation: Is It Price Competitive?,” 25 Cardozo L.R. 65, 99 argues that contingency-fee firms stick to the same fee percentage (about 30% of the recovery) because of the so-called “signaling function” of the standard rate. The one-third…
The received wisdom is that in-house lawyers can knowledgeably assess the appropriateness of bills submitted by law firms. This folk wisdom can’t be doubted if the lawyer, while at the law department, has handled many similar matters with outside counsel, or if the lawyer was for some time the billing…
If a client issues stock to a law firm, most commonly the client lacks cash to pay in full for the firm’s services. During the boom days of Silicon Valley, it was not uncommon for stripling companies to pay their law firms cash and also to issue them stock. Apparently…
According to a consultant quoted in Law Practice, Vol. 32, April/May 2006 at 10, “one major client of several big firms refuses to pay any more for associates with less than two years’ experience than it would have to pay for legal assistants.” Even so, that client might be overpaying…
Deep down, and in their most honest self-reflection, law firm partners might wish there were no in-house counsel. Those inside lawyers clog the arteries that would otherwise flow smoothly, but for their legal cholesterol. The unexpressed resentment is dis-lawyer-heartening – a tmesis, which means the “separation of the parts of…
This is a hot topic. Crunched to save costs, many law departments freeze rate increases by their law firms. General counsel say, “We are losing money,” or “We can’t pass on cost increases to our customers,” so you law firms, our partners in legal service, need to share the pain…
Every law department I have consulted to pegs the bill-approval level of its lawyers by their level. If you are an associate general counsel, the authorizations lets you sign off on bills up to $35,000. If you are an assistant general counsel, $25,000 (See my post of March 23, 2006…
Why might those letters now mean Under-used Thereafter by Managers and Supervisors? Let’s catalog why. The task structure fit best with litigation, which accounts for something around half of the spending; the remainder of legal services never lent itself to a taxonomic approach suitable for coding. Even within litigation, the…
What is the difference between a law firm agreeing to discount its rates and agreeing to rebate a portion of the fees paid to it if the fee total exceeds an agreed-upon amount? Timing, certainly. Psychology, too, since the rebate encourages a law department to use the firm more. An…
“Research suggests that decision-makers don’t realize just how easily and often their objectivity is compromised.” Blunt words from Daniel Gilbert, a psychology professor at Harvard, in the NY Times, April 16, 2006 at WK12, who emphasizes our penchant for uncritically accepting evidence when it pleases us (“I like firm XYZ,…