Grab your abacus and try these assumptions. A lawyer whose full cost to the company is $200 an hour spends two hours a week reviewing law-firm invoices. That lawyer manages $520,000 of spend each year, so each week $10,000. From each week’s batch, based on my consulting experience from asking…
I’m tired of hearing about BTCL. You’d think from the press and pundits that make-or-break, do-or-die, all-in Texas hold ‘em litigation cases were a dime a dozen. They are not. They are once in a blue moon and so not the reason for law departments being blue about outside counsel…
During a teleconference hosted by ACC’s Law Department Management, Litigation and Small Law Department committees, the Chief Litigation Counsel of American Express, Stuart Alderoty, explained his department’s budgeting practices. The law firms hired to represent Amex on a matter must submit a matter budget for the year (I do not…
Formal Opinion 93-379 of the ABA Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility presumably holds even now, a dozen years later. The Opinion concludes that the practice of billing more than one client for the same time is unreasonable and violates Rule 1.5(b) of the Rules of Professional Conduct. Hooray,…
When law departments select a law firm to handle all their work of a certain kind at a fixed fee, the departments often establish performance metrics. These metrics might include average turnaround time (leases, for example), resolution statistics (litigation and EEOC charges), productivity (patent applications), and quality (zoning variances fully…
Easy to say: “set up fee bonuses or holdbacks for law firms helping on transactions, so they have some skin in the game.” Hard to get around, however, is the likelihood that law firms lack leverage either way. In the words of the general counsel of Kewill Systems, “When a…
When a law firm submits budget on a matter, there may be a salutary effect on the matter’s cost, but would it be much use if the budget were simply a number; $300,000 for six months? No. The real insights from a budget, and therefore its ability to corral costs,…
These two law departments, both UK based and re-constituting their panels, chose an entirely new set of external counsel. That wholesale swap out puts the lie to contentions that incumbent firms, who presumably know the client, have the high upper hand. To the contrary, the in-place firms might have gotten…
To provide the historical data firms want to have for them to figure out what to bid, to prepare the RFP and choose the second round firms, to hold a due diligence session, to interview finalists and negotiate an acceptable arrangement – the game must be worth the candle. A…
Roger Marks, the former general counsel of H2O Plus, writes in InsideCounsel, Feb. 2006 at 14 about how to select overseas firms. Nearly all his advice will help in-house lawyers, but I take exception to one statement Marks makes: “One thing to remember when you are shopping for overseas counsel…