Law departments like law firms that innovate to meet the department’s needs. As an example, KMWorld, Feb. 2012, at 10-11, describes one client that uses Littler Mendelson to mediate, settle and defend EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) complaints. The client’s law department wanted a nationwide fixed price for that work.…
Of the departments participating in ALM’s metrics survey last year, 68 provided data on how many law firms they had retained in 2010 and how many they had retained in 2009. Among that group, contrary to all the talk about dramatic reductions in the number of law firms retained, their…
Twenty-nine colleges or universities use the fixed fee retainer program of the National Center for Higher Education Risk Management (NCHERM). Corp. Counsel, Feb. F012 at 20, reports on this unusual arrangement where legal services are outsourced. The founder of NCHERM offers colleges legal advice, training programs and expert witness services…
TyMetrix has produced the “Litigation Rate Snapshot,” based on its LegalVIEW data warehouse of billing and matter information. Covering $15 billion in fees submitted by 147,000 individual U.S. billers, a table shows average rates paid associates and partners in five industry groups. For three of them (Finance, Investments and Banking;…
TyMetrix has produced an 8-page handout, the “Litigation Rate Snapshot,” based on its LegalVIEW data warehouse of billing and matter information. The full report covers $15 billion in fees submitted by 10,000 U.S. law firms and 147,000 individual billers. The total hours reached 39 million. At the most aggregated level,…
“Most large law firms have far more lawyers than the availability of client work requires.” Ed Wesemann in the Edge International Communique asserts this. Wesemann explains that “This is, in part, driven by the law school hiring programs that require firms to predict their staffing needs almost two years in…
The “European Briefings” supplement to the ACC Docket, Dec. 2011, at 12, describes how Procter & Gamble’s EMEA law department, 120 lawyers strong in two dozen locations, coped with regulations by the European Commission’s of chemical substances. The department worked closely with Allen & Overy on compliance with REACH, including…
An ad in Diversity & The Bar promotes a highly specialized database that can tell a general counsel how much the law department pays in fees to diverse lawyers. I took a look at the website and could not find out more than the ad explains. The ad mentions that…
This term, new to me, appeared in a catalogue of books from MIT Press. Here is a definition from George Ainsley’s website. “Picoeconomics (micro-micro-economics) explores the implications … that people (often) … discount the prospect of future rewards in a curve that is more deeply bowed than a “rational,” exponential…
As companies do business in increasing numbers of countries, it follows that they will need to hire law firms in some of them. Convergence of firms – the deliberate use of dramatically fewer law firms – must then give way to de-convergence – a larger roster of firms retained. Likewise,…