Amidst all the hand-wringing and chest-beating about the “spiraling” cost of outside counsel, a broader perspective would recognize that “all industries that use highly educated labor have had to pay more for their major service providers.” The quote in the NY Rev. of Books, Feb. 24, 2011 at 41, comes…
Interviewing law firms recently about the effects on them of a major convergence effort, I heard one partner say “Out of every ten of these programs, five to six never get past the RFP stage.” Few companies that launch an RFP expedition ever actually reach land. “Companies want to reduce…
National coordinating counsel handle important tasks. They can help responses to document requests be responded to consistently. They can work with public relations to build a consistent picture for the public of a spate of suits. They can take similar positions in pleadings around the country and can assess the…
A recent article discusses the tensions between procurement (aka sourcing or purchasing) and legal. The sharpest sting comes at the end: most fundamentally Procurement threatens by “openly considering whether to maintain internal lawyers if an outside firm can do better quality work at a lower price.” You, inside lawyer, lose…
Nathan Myhrvold wrote a fascinating article about what he calls invention capital. The former chief technology officer at Microsoft and now the CEO of Intellectual Vendors, a company based on patents and invention, lays out a remarkable agenda for change in the way he predicts patententable ideas and patents will…
A piece in Corp. Counsel, Jan. 2011 at A2, expresses the views of a partner with the Butler Rubin firm. Under “fairness and integrity in billing” he describes and approves a rule that a mentor of his espoused. “If a client questioned a bill, he would tell the client to…
A supplement to Chapter 4 of Robert Haig’s Successful Partnering Between Inside and Outside Counsel (West) at 4.3 note 1, quotes an article from GC California Magazine (May 14, 2008). The article’s author, a former general counsel, wrote that “[s]ome businesspeople use a rule of thumb, based upon experience in…
At the Consero 2010 Corporate Counsel Forum, one panel put up a slide with data from the ACC Chief Legal Officer Survey in 2008. The slide showed a dozen outcomes desired by legal departments, which participants in the survey ranked in decreasing order of importance from 12 to 1, the…
At the recent Consero 2010 Corporate Counsel Forum, the slides of one panel included material on how to select a preferred provider network. Included in the mock analysis of several incumbent law firms that hoped to be chosen were the number of full-time equivalent attorneys that had charged time to…
One reason Rich Baer, the outspoken general counsel of Qwest Communications, disparages alternative fee arrangements (AFA’s) is that law firms might make more money than if they bill hourly. He discusses this point in Corp. Counsel, Dec. 2010 at 68, but I think Baer conflates two ideas. Law firm profits…