A recent survey of European law departments calculated the fully-loaded cost per lawyer hour across five industries (Chemicals, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Pharmaceuticals, and Technology), a total of 48 departments. The range was 74 euros/hour to 926 euros/hour. An astonishing range, to be sure! The median for each of the five industries,…
DuPont has begun to require its 43 preferred law firms (PLFs) to divulge whether partners are equity or non-equity when they ask for a fee increase for partners. Since 2002, DuPont’s legal department has required its PLF’s to submit a nine-part application when they requeste a rate hikes, and as…
How can you know that blended rates are saving you money? Working with an aerospace law department, I heard a lawyer say, with no explanation, “We are saving money because X firm is giving us a blended rate.” There is no way to prove savings unless you had previously calculated…
After a four-month project in 2005, the law department of General Electric dropped more than 400 law firms, to a converged group of 94. The final surgery came after an online auction. About 142 law firms competed against each other in auctions for seven practice areas to provide GE “with…
This law department has created a “compliance audit review process.” The second part (the first is a routine check whether the firm comports with the bank’s billing policies) assesses what the firm has done in the past year in terms of “value-added servicing: such as co-training and shared technology, The…
Long ago, in 2002, the leading reason why law departments had not implemented “value-based fees,” according to a survey by Examenb, was “resistance from outside law firms.” The same refrain is sung today – “our law firms drag their heels.” The contrapuntal tune, from law firm managing partners, sings a…
The Attorney-General’s Department of Australia, and specifically its Office of Legal Services Coordination, has published a solid, nicely-written document that covers all aspects of retaining outside counsel. For local, state and federal agency law departments tasked with developing a policy statement, or interested in seeing how one can be laid…
A post on morepartnerincom.com (Aug. 1, 2005), a site hosted by JURIS, which offers a leading law-firm time and billing system, pulls aside the curtain. On average, law firms “take 78 days just to bill for work performed, [and] the typical firm takes 60 additional days to collect once they…
Patrick Lamb, host of In Search of Perfect Client Service (Aug. 23, 2005) commented on my post regarding possibly-low switching costs when transferring cases. Lamb points out that a fixed fee for the remainder of the case is much more plausible than at the start. After all, Firm 2 knows…
About 1995, Marriott International shrank its “bloated legal Rolodex” from well over 200 law firms to the ten firms that a decade later handle 90 percent of the company’s external counsel work. Such longevity and stability of key firms astounds me; it is much to the credit of law department…