When it comes to pitches, the in-house lawyers at a recent panel said they’re open to the business development team’s involvement in the pitch process and cross selling. Sheri Qualters, writing for the National Law Journal, on Nov. 24, 2009, noted these comments by panelists at an LMA conference in…
A month ago I criticized the practice of reviewing draft invoices from law firms (See my post of Oct. 25, 2009: don’t waste time on draft bills.). Sure enough, I then ran across an in-house counsel who favors the practice. The lawyer is Paul Cushing, litigation and compliance counsel of…
When attorneys at a firm who have worked significantly on a matter leave the firm, clients “incur significant costs to pay for both the learning curve of the new lawyers and the in-house lawyers time spent on training.” To quantify that intuitive sense, one legal department tracked the costs incurred…
In Australia, Allygroup “was set up by a specialist litigation manager specifically to project manage litigation on an outsourced basis.” The ACC Docket, Nov. 2009 at 18 says no more and the website too is taciturn. Still, it makes sense to import the skills and disciplines of project management to…
“Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe is earning a flat fee to handle all of the legal work worldwide for Levi Strauss & Co., other than its brand protection work, the Recorder reports. If work needs to be done where Orrick doesn’t have an office, it will hire an outside law firm…
I have this belief, quite possibly fallacious, that lower-cost firms have less margin to cut, so discounts across the board along the lines of “10% from the standard rates of each of our firms” hurt them more than higher-cost, fatter margin firms. Perhaps that belief is unfounded hooey, since lower…
I smile when I read all the survey results about what law department attorneys look for in outside counsel (See my post of Oct. 22, 2008: law firm attributes for selection with 12 references.). In the abstract, anyone can reel off desiderata. The nitty-gritty chore, however, of rating a specific…
Just as all supervisors should praise their staff, all in-house lawyers who are responsible for the delivery of external services should commend good work by a law firm. If you think that simply giving a firm more work percolates as kudos down to the associates and paralegals in the pit,…
Law firms try hard to get the work done when their inside counterpart asks for it. A hallmark of service to a client is to bust your chops, as the saying goes, to pull an all-nighter, to mobilize all the associates and paralegals the task demands, to meet the deadline…
It is wonderful for me, blogging into mostly implacable silence, to hear from someone, whether or not they agree with me. In fact, disagreement helps me learn and adjust my views. So when Dan Williams wrote me about some of my variations on rate freezes (See my post of Nov.…