For some time, I have fretted about an under-discussed obstacle to successful cost reduction. Law department managers assume their reports will diligently keep the brakes on law firm spending. Counter-intuitively, perhaps, those same lawyers may willingly tramp on the accelerator. My article last week in the National Law Journal lays…
“Despite the anecdotal perception that demand for alternative fee arrangements may have grown stronger following the 2008 collapse, there are no publicly available longitudinal data to evaluate such claims. Comprehensive empirical data on the market penetration of alternative fee arrangements, and the demonstrable benefits of those arrangements to corporate clients,…
An article with this title appears in Claims Mgt., March 2012 at 14. Metrics fan that I am, I read with interest about the six. Not much to say on the first two, except to agree that time to close and average defense cost per claim make sense to track.…
Two schools of thought about ethics afford us a different way to think about value delivered by law firms. Consequentialism is the ethical view that what is right is what brings about good results. That is the summary in A.C. Grayling, Ideas that Matter: the concepts that shape the 21st…
An article in the ABA J., March 2012 at 26, focuses on bad behavior – jerks – in law firms, and cites Haynes and Boone as a firm that touts its long-standing no-jerks policy. Moreover, “The policy extends to clients as well, and Haynes and Boone has had to disengage…
Vincent Polley’s weekly compilation cited Legal Futures, Feb. 20, 2012, regarding Riverview Law. Riverview Law is the brainchild of LawVest, which has financial backing from global law firm DLA Piper and intends to become an alternative business structure (ABS). It will offer “businesses with up to 1,000 employees annual contracts…
Whenever a law firm agrees to a fee to handle all the work of a defined kind for a set period, what is known as a fixed-fee agreement, that firm should be granted a corresponding ability to influence what the company does that triggers the work. The firm should be…
Writing in the ACC Docket, Jan./Feb. 2012 at 18, Ron Pol discusses some of the financial and ethical pitfalls of fixed fees. He cites the frustrated managing partner of a major law firm: “In-house counsel often seek alternatives to hourly rates, then demand hours and rate information as well, forcing…
An article in Paradigm, Winter 2012 at 24, by Clayton Wire clayton.wire@starrslaw.com lays out five things companies should consider to lessen the likelihood that they will need to resort to a malpractice claim. Companies, he writes, “should never proceed forward with representation by outside counsel without a written fee agreement.”…
Respondents to last year’s ALM metrics survey ranked seven possible internal obstacles for law firms to fully implementing alternative pricing strategies. The leading reason was “Law firms are more comfortable with the billable hour” (2.2 average ranking where 1 is most important). Next was “Absent better metrics and data, it…