A 1997 study by the California State Auditor of expert witnesses used by the California Department of Transportation’s Legal Division looked at practices of expert witnesses when they bill for travel time. Out of 16 expert witness firms, 13 of them billed travel on behalf of a client at standard…
You can find a list of 15 points to consider in guidelines for outside counsel at the website of Global Law Review. The points touch no new areas, except one: “terms on which outside counsel may use the relationship with you for promotional purposes.” Every now and then, ads quote…
Consider this permutation on billing. A law department I know has arranged with a law firm to have its lawyers work on a blended rate (about $220 per hour) with the exception of the lead partner, who bills at his hourly rate less a discount. By this balancing act, the…
Nancy Anderson, Deputy General Counsel for Microsoft, manages a legal staff of 200, of whom 250 are outside the US. She and her group often need to retain local counsel. A recent piece, Counsel to Counsel, Jan. 2006 at 27, summarized her recommendations and those of David Kleiman, AGC of…
A survey conducted by LexisNexis Examen at the ACC 2005 annual meeting obtained responses from 86 law departments. Those departments had many excuses for having not succeeded in seceding from hourly billing. Here is how they ranked their reasons, from Counsel to Counsel, Jan. 2006 at 15, with the number…
Some general counsel subscribe to this view regarding their key law firm: “Our philosophy is we want to be one of the most important clients for the firm. A company our size [Coachmen Industries] isn’t that important to the mega-firms” (Richard Lavers, its general counsel, in Corp. Legal Times, July…
Hearing that one law department urges its primary law firm to give ample bonuses to associates who have provided stellar service, and learning of a general counsel who actively lobbied for a favored associate to make partner, I mused that partnering might lead law departments to hitherto unheard of interventions.…
A summary of comments by 43 law-firm managing partners of law firms on the topic of “burning issues” (Of Counsel, Vol. 24, Nov. 2005 at 8), contained a quote from one who heads a firm of more than 500 lawyers. “[C]lients really can’t distinguish between quality and mediocrity. Thus, we…
Having reduced the number of outside firms it uses from approximately 750 in 1999 to 300 in early 2005, and having chosen approximately 80 of the survivors as “preferred counsel,” who currently receive close to 75 percent of United Technologies’ spend, the law department has learned some lessons (From Jan.…
In my post of May 30, 2005 I referred to a dozen legal networks: Lex Mundi, AM LF Association, Interlaw, Interlex, Meritas, Pacific Rim Advisory, State Capital, Multilaw, TAGLaw, US LF Group, Terralex, and World Law Group (See my post of Nov. 11, 2005 and skepticism on whether departments rely…