“The one-stop shop is not a proposition of great interest to in-house counsel globally, nor is it believable,” is the conclusion reached by E. Leigh Dance and Deborah McMurray, “10 Things We’ve Learned from In-House Counsel in the US and Europe.” According to the authors, the majority of in-house counsel…
LexisNexis Martindale-Hubble, using Cogent Research, obtained responses from 635 in-house counsel, 461 of which were from the United States (Counsel to Counsel, March 2006 at 15). Of the nine criteria available for selection, the first ranked was “lawyer expertise” – with 87 percent – while “firm expertise” was third at…
Law departments ought to demolish rigid billing rates, according to which Partner X charges $410 per hour regardless of what that partner does during the hour. The fifteen minute conversation with a senior partner that cuts through complexity, integrates years of experience with many clients, and leavens it all with…
A somewhat dated article, NYLJ, Nov. 10, 2003, describes the competitive bid process that General Electric Commercial Finance set in motion on Sept. 29, 2003. J. Keith Morgan, the general counsel of GECF, hosted the various “competitive bidding rooms” on a site managed by Atlanta-based Procuri.com. At the article’s end,…
Sketch two axes that intersect in the lower left. The horizontal axis describes work sent out to law firms on a scale of legally simple to complex (well-known law applied to straightforward facts in one state or country on up to multiple areas of law that intersect, sophisticated structures or…
You might have missed this news. To handle a case that was adjourned after only five days of argument, the Office of the Attorney General of Kenya – more precisely, its State Law Office that includes 50 lawyers – unilaterally and secretively retained and paid six lawyers equal portions of…
This is the kind of blog post that worries me. Am I going to offend the very lawyers I depend on for work? Am I merely being provocative, with no substance? Does this world need to pull any more heroes off pedestals? I view one of my contributions to be…
Sorry, no answer to this. The question came to me as I considered a client of mine where the recently appointed GC had been a partner at a major firm. I wish someone could study a number of law departments that hired a GC from a firm the department had…
BDO Stoy Hayward benchmarked profit per partner at leading law firm in eight European countries, as reported in the Fin. Times, Jan. 16, 2006 at 19. Median profits per partner jumped from €337,900 ($410,000) in 2004 to €406,300 ($493,000) in 2005 – more than 20 percent! The article credits “the…
(1) “The draft agreement lacks clarity on environmental concerns, creates major risks, and contains no addenda.” (2) “The draft agreement lacks clarity on environmental concerns, creating major risks, and contains no addenda.” Sentence (1) puts equal emphasis on all three verbs, “lacks” and “creates” and “contains.” In (2), however, the…