The Altman Weil 2005 survey of law departments found that only 18 percent of them “formally evaluate” their outside counsel. Those 26 law departments, from a participant group of 140 that included 40 with revenues over $5 billion, certainly vary in the degree of formality, discipline and coverage of their…
From my experience of having consulted on seven competitive bids, I cannot stress too much the crucial step of identifying assumptions. The proposing law firms and the law department should both state as many assumptions as they can and how they are relying on them. For example, “our bid assumes…
Data from Legal Week Intelligence’s 2005 Client Satisfaction Survey of more than 220 companies in the FTS 1000 ranks 11 categories of law firm attributes. (Legal Week, Vol. 7, Sept. 22, 2005 at 4.) “Quality of legal advice,” “Service delivery,” and “Responsiveness” share the highest scores (median 9 out of…
JennerNet is Jenner & Block’s system that collects information from the firm’s accounting, e-mail, conflicts, records, HR, document management, customer relationship management (CRM), and other unstructured databases (Law Practice, Vol. 31, Oct./Nov. 2005 at 8). JennerNet apparently allows law departments to see billing information about their matters, documents and e-mails…
Law departments, especially those with big budgets and brand names, like to thump their chests and demand from their firms the best rates the firms give. Setting aside my mistrust for rates-based billing (See my posts of May 4 and August 24, 2005 savaging discounts on hourly rates and Sept.…
Consider asking your major firms to state at the top of sizeable bills the handful of activities that accounted for most of the bill and the total amount of each of those activities. “Reviewing documents from the Oak Plant, $11,000; researching memo on EPA pre-emption; $7,000; appearance at Oak Zoning…
Seven characteristics of “least successful outside counsel” showed up in Fulbright & Jaworski’s Second Annual Litigation Trends Survey (Full report at 84). From respondents at 103 companies with revenue of $1 billion or more, here were the black marks that can blackball a firm (with the percentage of law departments…
Most surveys that ask law departments to rank the criteria they use for choosing outside counsel report in the top two or three criteria “industry experience.” In-house counsel like working with external lawyers who know their industries’ issues, terminology, history, and business models. Yet Geoffrey Parnass, a New York City…
A recent report states that “40% of the [103] $1 billion-plus companies considered diversity important in selecting outside counsel, 30% reported having had a dialogue with outside firms regarding diversity, and 16% had written diversity policies to which outside counsel were required to adhere.” Fulbright & Jaworski’s Second Annual Litigation…
The Siamese twin of outside-counsel cost management is alternative billing arrangements. No one can write a word about the former without bemoaning the latter, yet 90 percent of law firm invoices show hours worked multiplied by hourly rates. For many reasons, this clash between concept (alternatives to hourly rate billing)…