In late 2003, the Arizona Attorney published a roundtable discussion among six senior corporate lawyers (40 AZ Attorney 12 (Nov. 2003)). Asked whether he had ever fired outside counsel, the General Counsel of Dial Corporation said “yes” and explained. “The times we have faced a problem is when we have…
Big name clients, with their tens of millions of dollars spent on outside counsel, irresistibly lure large law firms. The moths want very much to fly where there are searing burn rates. The celebrity corporations, however, want their candles to burn a long time and not be wasted. In fact,…
A piece in Legal Week (Sept.8, 2005) discussed keeping secret the decisions by law departments on choosing panels in the U.K. It brought to mind the potency of law departments publicizing that they have selected a particular firm to handle a major area of work. Dupont even ran space ads…
A fascinating article in the September issue of the ABA Journal (pg. 53 et seq.) related this fact (pg. 54). The General Counsel of Cisco, Mark Chandler – who comes across in the article as a zealous, creative missionary for change in law department spending practices – wants to increase…
A columnist in Litigation Management (Summer 2003 at 46) www.lawexec.com wrote, somewhat tongue in cheek, about paying law firms based in part on the evaluations the firms received from the law department and its clients. “We’ll hold back a portion of invoices – say 20 percent – and then [the…
Hildebrandt’s 2004 and 2005 U.S. Law Department Survey results for all participants show a 9% increase in billing rates for the top three billing firms over a two year period. The estimated rates increased from $298 to $325 an hour. The ratio of outside counsel spending as a percent of…
We reviewed a slew of invoices for a law department, and found an overall discount rate of two percent, and most of that measly amount was due to one much-used firm that gave a ten percent discount. The sad story, we learned, was more complex. Digging further, we discovered that…
For litigation, Duquesne Light uses a Pittsburgh firm, Tucker Arensberg, which handles the utility’s cases on a fixed-fee basis. The general counsel of Duquesne did not give details in the article that described the fee arrangement (GC Mid-Atlantic, Aug. 2005 at 32) but the fact that they have accomplished this…
Being listed as one of their 20 most frequently used law firms in America, according to the latest corporate counsel survey, probably boils down to size; the larger the firm, the more likely it is to be cited. This hypothesis makes sense because more law departments have an opportunity to…
The General Counsel of Citigroup, Michael Helfer, is on record that his law department “gets discounts from virtually all our law firms. We provide various incentives for higher discounts although we will not agree to provide a firm with a certain amount of business in return for a certain level…