An article about the law department at Cox Communications offers several benchmark tidbits. With 23,000 employees and 17 lawyers, it has one lawyer for every 1,353 employees (See my post of April 18, 2009: lawyers per 1,000 employees with 6 references.). At $8.5 billion in revenue, it boasts only two…
It is fruitless to define value of legal services in advance (ex ante) because all we can do beforehand is trot out platitudes such as knowledgeable, responsive, creative, inexpensive, practical. Such unarguable, bland and Boy-Scout-motto desiderata help as much as when we try to define “beauty,” or “art”, let alone…
Even if you have an agreement with a firm as to discounts, or even that its discount level goes up as you pay more, you should still check their invoices. Just because the firm shaves some fees doesn’t mean it was completely efficient or did all the right things at…
Four law professors believe that “Legal capacity insurance” comes to the fore as one of the benefits to a legal department of fashioning a long-term relationship with a law firm. This notion comes from an unpublished article (at 12), by Michele DeStafano Beardslee and three co-authors, presented at the Georgetown…
Having heard about licensing terms that need to be FRAN (fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory), I thought of Most Favored Nation terms. Law departments so routinely insist on MFN terms from their primary firms that the privilege has been diluted to meaninglessness and firms don’t really know how to comply (See…
LexisNexis Martindale-Hubble, in conjunction with the Forbes Institute, recently published a benchmarking report based on data from legal departments in Russia. One of the findings shows that legal departments obtain higher discounts for more routine work. In fact, the pattern was quite clear. At page 6 the study reports that…
Classical economics holds that if law firms charge more than what in-house lawyers are willing to pay, those fees will decline. If demand is less than supply, prices fall. Absent a monopoly, and no law firm in the United States has a monopoly on any legal service, and absent proprietary…
Summarizing discussion points at a conference of the Iberian Lawyer’s In-House Club, the author wrote that general counsel “had been requesting a reduction in law firm rates for lower value work … but had not yet looked for deep discounts for the highest value work.” That quote, from Iberian Lawyer,…
Thomas Dunlop, AVP Legal Services Operations, CNA Insurance, oversees CNA’s panel firms, litigation guideline and expense management, Legal Services operations, and legal vendor management and contracting. To the point of this post, according to Corp. Counsel, March 2010 at 77-79, Dunlop manages “a 22-person centralized bill review unit.” CNA Insurance…
“A quote given by a law firm that is well below the market expectation does not instill confidence either in the quality that may be ultimately offered, or the firm’s ability to foresee the potential issues that may arise.” A good quote from the Iberian Lawyer, Jan./Feb. 2010 at 25,…