Why not encourage your incumbent firms, the ones you are comfortable with, to cross-sell into areas of service where they have not served you (See my post of Feb. 20, 2009: cross-selling by law firm partners with 7 references.)? One way to encourage firms to expand their scope of services…
A consulting firm I know rewards its mid-level consultants quarterly if their utilization rates exceed a certain figure. It does so by giving them at the end of each quarter the percentage of their salary that is the same as the percentage they exceeded the utilization goal. If a law…
In any given matter, for any given requirement governed by your guidelines for outside counsel, the supervising attorney may properly decide to waive or modify the requirement. Law departments could state that option expressly before every requirement (“Unless otherwise modified or waived by the supervising attorney, the Firm must …..”)…
In an article in Strategies: The J. of Legal Marketing, Vol. 11, Aug. 2009 at 5, Susan Hackett of the ACC Hackett@acc.com says that law firms participating in the ACC Value Challenge seek to “turn two long-time in-house mantras on their head:” “No one ever got fired for hiring [Insert…
In my ideal matter the law firm works on it under a fixed fee, so invoices are simple. Real life, however, mostly serves up hourly bills. Each monthly bill is like a layer in lasagna (See my post of Feb. 21, 2007: standardized formats of bills.). The good stuff (cheese,…
Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of a Radical Price (Hyperion 2009) at 80-83 explains the concept that what we pay for something usually includes more and more over time; the quality of what you buy today is greater than the same purchase several years ago. A quality-adjusted measurement of legal…
An unsung hero of invoices trails along at the end, the recap. Typically it lists in a table format each timekeeper who logged time during the invoice month, the number of those hours, and the billing rate of the timekeeper. A little multiplication leaves the final column that shows the…
A checklist for outside counsel guidelines recommends a protocol it describes as a “weekly billing summary.” The law firm must submit each week to the general counsel (!) and each lawyer responsible for a matter an informal summary of the week’s billings. The summary lists the names of the billers,…
Software exists which helps a litigator quantify the likelihood of various decisions and occurrences in a lawsuit and attach to them outcome amounts. Along with the software there are consultants who can advise litigants on decision-tree methodologies (See my post of June 17, 2009: decision tree software with 6 references.)…
It is sound management for a legal department to insist that its primary firms designate a core group of lawyers who will bill most of the fees on a matter. That core-staff notion has ample intuitive appeal. What’s needed are some operational guidelines. One way to establish a core team…