The National Law Journal reports a new requirement from Wal-Mart’s legal group on its outside counsel. “Law firms must have flextime policies if they want to do legal work for Wal-Mart.” Associate general counsel Joseph West told an audience at the annual meeting of the Association of Corporate Counsel in…
We are in the midst of another broad-scale effort to compile law department evaluations of law firms. This time the Association of Corporate Counsel leads the charge, and claims early in the battle to have lots of cavalry behind it. I have my doubts about the war’s success, but I…
As with tracking time, entering data into matter management systems and capturing know-how, in-house lawyers see very little benefit to themselves, individually, for their administrative effort of evaluating law firms. They know who they like and don’t like and the rest is a time sponge with no redeeming benefit. Slacking…
“Average reported savings from using matter management systems were 36.8% of outside legal spending.” Incredible, and not to be believed. The claim comes from the 2008 ACC/Serengeti Managing Outside Counsel Survey, which obtained survey responses from hundreds of ACC-member law departments. I have twice before challenged similar claims drawn from…
Those legal departments whose attorneys grade law firms most commonly do the exercise every six months or once a year. As an alternative choice, departments can follow a policy of evaluations when major matters end. My objection to semi-annual or annual reviews comes down to mélange. Everything that happens during…
“Am I competent to handle this problem or should I check with outside counsel?” Regrettably, some in-house counsel choose poorly. More regrettably, the less competent lawyers choose the most poorly. “When we lack a particular skill we not only overestimate our capabilities, but we are also blissfully ignorant of our…
“Comparing individual law firms’ forecasts against the company’s actual spend with those firms is a useful key performance indicator.” That belief – matter budgets compared to actuals tell something – comes from an article in the Practical Law J., Vol. 1, Nov. 2009 at 70, about the 100-lawyer department of…
One senior in-house lawyer I know likes to get invoices in draft form. His defense of that practice is that once a firm sends a bill in final form, any write offs or changes cause internal problems for the firm. Secondarily, he believes that the draft reminds them that a…
Some large law departments have set up teams whose job it is to review bills of outside counsel. I don’t favor that approach. First, anything a team can do should be something e-billing software can do, such as checking for arithmetic mistakes, mis-billings, staffing infractions, and violations of guidelines. Second,…
The ACC Docket, Vol. 27, Oct. 2009 on an ad after page 64, describes a cost saving result for outside counsel expenses that is nothing short of astonishing. When Bruce Futterer became general counsel of General Electric Canada in January 2007, “he went to all the law firms that he…