A quote from the General Counsel Survey 2009 of Belgium-based consultants FrahanBlondé at 37 came from an exasperated general counsel: “They [law firms] have no idea how many of our products we have to sell to pay a bill of €100,000.” That lament started me calculating. Given a company’s profit…
A short note in an article troubled me: “firms house what is represented as an independent copying vendor … without disclosing to the client any financial interest that the firm may have in the vendor.” The article is in Lit. Mgt. Rep., Oct. 2009 at 4, by Rick Hauser, an…
In Peer to Peer, an ILTA publication at 76, an article by Scott Wirtz swirtz@loeb.com mentions that “Sophisticated audit techniques can now detect a narrative that contains what is referred to as ‘block billing.” Block billing is one term to describe time records that jumble together activities under a total…
On the law department side, several punctures let out a lot of UTBMS air in terms of fees. First, you need software to sort through the time entries and place them in their appropriate categories. Not every law department has that software or is willing to invest in it. A…
The chief corporate lawyer at Deutsche Lufthansa, Nicolai von Ruckteschell, went on record about law firms that serve his company and venture into alternative fees. According to him in the European Lawyer, Issue 91, Nov./Dec. 2009 at 35, “We have seen a bit of risk sharing, with a lot of…
Gale force winds blow the message that legal departments should tourniquet various expenses charged by profligate law firms. A recent breeze from the opposite quarter, however, tells us that many firms do not frequently or routinely charge to clients expenses that sometimes blow clients away. ILTA’s 2009 Technology Survey, at…
One of the common steps to reduce the costs of outside counsel assumes that inside lawyers can segment matters into those that deserve high-priced talent, those that have more modest demands suitable for mid-tier firms, and those that bump along the bottom as commodity work for lower cost firms. If…
The knock on general counsel who reflexively call Prestige, Admired & Realcostly to gain cover if things go wrong goes might be called CYA Theory (See my post of Aug. 15, 2008: CYA and 6 references.). Some truth there probably is to that theory, but another reason to pick up…
When law firms apply for their fees to be paid by a bankruptcy court, they must disclose their attorney’s hourly billing rates. Those rates for 18 major US law firms are available in the Am. Lawyer, Feb. 2010 at 45, as median partner and associate rates as well as the…
When a legal department chooses a group of primary law firms and those firms offer deep-dish discounts, what happens if later on the department chooses a firm other than one of them to handle a major matter? Will that firm be yoked to the same discount schedule? If not, if…