The Second Annual Law Department Operations Survey at 9 lists 16 initiatives that respondents, all administrators in large US legal departments, ranked by effectiveness. The list is solid. It covers techniques that any legal department can put into action to reduce outside counsel expenses and I have written or will…
I ran into a study that found the timing of payment to law firms varied significantly around the company and that the particular company often paid outside counsel more rapidly than it paid other vendors. Unless prompt payment discounts apply for law firms, this should not happen (See my post…
To your list of law firm associations, add one more: the CIUS Leading Counsel Network. From the write-up in the European Lawyer, Issue 91, Nov./Dec. 2009 at 9, the nine firms cover Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Russia, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine, Moldova, and Belarus (my spell checker collapsed). For general counsel who…
The Second Annual Law Department Operations Survey at 9 lists 16 initiatives that respondents, all administrators in large US legal departments, ranked by effectiveness. At the top, selected by seven out of ten of the operations managers who took part, is “Use less expensive attorneys (i.e., regional firms)” Six of…
A firm in England, with all the outward trappings of what in the United States would be a white-shoe law firm (elite office location, phone number, resumes, spiffy website) and regulated as a law firm, actually bases nearly all its 14 lawyers in Jerusalem. Asserson Law Offices, as described in…
Several cost-reduction techniques ranked in a recent survey rely on in-house lawyers, more so than administrators, to make them happen. In fact, the top rated one requires much more of lawyers than of operations managers, “Use less expensive attorneys (i.e., regional firms).” The full list of sixteen techniques comes from…
A British firm, Shoosmiths, has an “umbrella” arrangement with Hewlett-Packard, as reported by the Financial Times report, “Innovative Lawyers 2009,” dated Oct. 23, 2009 at 36. The report discloses neither the amount nor the time period of the deal. The fixed price deal covers all employment, property, and medium-sized litigation.…
The legal world might not quite be ready for “blooks” – books made up of organized and annotated blog postings. Even so, scores of readers of this blog have visited the Mitratech website to get my blook on outside counsel management. Just click here, register, and you too can brag…
Researchers from the General Counsel Roundtable on outside counsel management practices defined these two terms in a sensible way, and this blogger will adopt the definitions. A fixed fee is an amount a law department agrees to pay a law firm to handle all work in a given area for…
A presenter at a December conference cited research from the General Counsel Roundtable on outside counsel management practices. The GCR found that “seven of the top ten … practices with the highest return on investment were alternative fee arrangements.” The rest not being given, I would nominate selection of firms,…