My hypothesis correlates size of law firm with average shortness of legal careers. The larger the law firm, the lower the average number of years out of law school of its lawyers. If you hire a 1,000 lawyer firm, all the associates on the matter and the relatively diminished input…
If you follow the star partner, the sun may set. Most in-house counsel will be inclined to follow a well-respected partner who leaves one firm to join another. Few law firms fight that choice, I believe, because the leaders of the firm understand the underlying loyalty to a particular lawyer…
On the shores of legal management the latest wave of enthusiasm has many project management surfers. The skills required to estimate time to complete tasks, the best order of those tasks, the right people and tools in the right spots, all these are aspects of project management as I understand…
Many companies officially adhere to a policy that “Only the law department may retain external counsel.” The rule generally honored, infractions still pop up here and there. What can a GC do? Make sure there is a clearly-worded corporate policy easily obtained by everyone in the company. Continually repeat and…
Pareto optimality, roughly, describes a situation in which no one’s position can be improved without making someone else’s position worse. That definition comes from Stephen H. Kellert, Borrowed Knowledge: Chaos Theory and the Challenge of Learning Across Disciplines (Univ. Chic. 2008) at 161. If you contemplate a change in your…
An RFP to 20 law firms sounds great – “proposals from that many will give us more insights, more leverage, stronger competition, and a better selection” – but the selection team has almost certainly overestimated its capacity tor manage all of the choices it needs to make(See my post of…
Payment to a law firm based on the value of what is at stake makes sense at times. An article in Law Practice, Nov./Dec. 2010 at 34, gives several examples of “price as a percentage of a dependent variable, such as an employment agreement, an acquisition or a real estate…
An article in Law Practice, Nov./Dec. 2010 at 34, mentions several variations on the billable hour, including “daily, weekly and annual rates for individuals and teams.’ My vote against daily rates has already been cast, with later equivocation (See my post of June 5, 2007: daily rates for outside lawyers…
If you ask a law firm to propose a set fee to handle a future stream of your legal services, if they take into account the range of the possible mixes of those services, if they conjure up all the exceptional matters and cases they might handle, they will inflate…
The Chairman of Shook, Hardy & Bacon, a 500-plus attorney firm with revenues of more than $1 billion, wrote about alternative fee arrangements (AFAs) in Law Practice, Nov./Dec. 2010 at 29. John Murphy noted that one-third of the firm’s revenue, notably in its litigation defense practice, comes from AFAs. What…