In the Fall of 2010 ALM Legal Intelligence administered an online survey that 176 US in-house lawyers took. LexisNexis CounselLink published the findings. In them respondents indicated whether or not they were “Instituting a 360° review process for all law firms”. I blinked 360 times. A full-circle review suggests that…
People bang on about why it is hard for a law firm to re-orient itself away from piling up billable hours, relying on old technology, not unbundling services handled better and cheaper by others, and so on in the litany of changes resisted. Law departments, too, move very slowly. Only…
A group of large law firms in the U.S. has proposed that “sophisticated” clients be permitted more flexibility when they retain law firms. Recognizing large companies know what they are doing and can assume more risks, they would have more room to maneuver in such areas as potential conflicts of…
Just because a law department assigns most of its work to a smallish number of preferred firms, there still remains a challenge when someone in the department needs to find an unusual legal specialist. When searching for a needle of expertise in the haystacks of hundreds of partners and associates,…
Even if a company does not enter into a fixed-fee arrangement for all-you-can-eat from a law firm in a specialized area, it might look into an arrangement where short calls are not billed. Alternatively, short calls are only billed a set amount such as $100 for a call of less…
An E-Bay procurement person who supports law department, speaking at Mitratech’s Interact Conference, explained her company’s use of a Tier 1 list of about a dozen law firms, each of which gets annual reviews and quarterly budget reviews. She mentioned that the company used more than 400 law firms five…
Some hard-nosed general counsel snort that project management counts as overhead and partners should not charge for the likes of those people. Like practice support specialists at UK firms, they are overhead. Others, who have witnessed the plus side of project management or are more in tune with the benefits…
According to a speaker at a recent conference from the law department of Office Depot, that department opened 7,489 matters in 2010 of which outside counsel assisted with a mere 2.4 percent! That ratio of inside to outside matters seems very low (See my post of May 24, 2011: 30%…
What if a law department took the 12-to-20 law firms it most commonly turns to and calculated the percentage of the firm’s revenue that comes from the department? You know your spend and you can estimate the firm’s revenue from league tables or extrapolations from them. If a firm has…
An article describes a fixed-fee basis arrangement between Brunswick Corp. and K&L Gates. ‘Following the first year of representation, the fixed-fee contract had to be modified in order to provide more protection for the law firm.” Brunswick and K&L Gates agreed to set “a ceiling on fixed fees” and to…