I have always assumed that secondments apply only to associates. Barclays, however, upset my comfortable presumption since they recently obtained as a secondee a litigation partner from Simmons & Simmons. Corp. Counsel, Vol. 16, Aug. 2009 at 59, does give me a bit of comfort as it notes that this…
In my consulting projects, the first-round proposals in competitive bids for fixed fees to handle significant amounts of legal work have varied by fifty percent or more. Stated differently, comparable firms differ in their proposed amounts by upwards of fifty percent of the lowest amount bid. If that gap holds…
Is it possible with legal departments that the less you spend inside the more you spend outside? Not as a percentage of total spending, because that calculation must total 100 percent: if you spend 30 percent inside you must spend 70 percent outside. What I mean is the ratio between…
As part of a study conducted for a publication of CPA Global, reported in Legal Strat. Rev., Summer 2009 at V, respondents were asked an ultimate question: “how they would rate the ‘value for money’ they got from external legal spend on a scale from one (lowest) to 10 (highest).”…
Peter Leeson, The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates (Princeton Univ. 2009), especially 164-171, explains why pirate ships often had sailors who were both black and free, not slaves. In essence, the benefits of slaves onboard were dispersed among all the pirates while the costs were concentrated – a…
Peter Leeson, The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates (Princeton Univ. 2009) at 94, discusses the economist’s concept of signaling. “The key to a successful signal is that it must be more costly for some types of individuals to send than for others.” Customary reliance on expensive, big law…
“Transaction costs are the costs of making exchanges – the time, effort, grief, and sometimes financial costs – associated with coming to an agreement with someone else.” The definition comes from Peter Leeson, The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates (Princeton Univ. 2009) at 54, but his point extends…
It abuses both your legal department and the law firm to send an invitation to compete for work for which the firm is not a plausible contender. Your project team has to answer their questions, respond to their requests, keep track of the firm in the process, and eventually deliver…
If the lawyers in-house who retain outside counsel can choose whomever they want, it may turn out to be unusual for any of them to use the same counsel. With such divergence, evaluations of outside counsel will not be collective, they will be individualistic. Such a pattern of isolated assessment…
Sometimes journalists write something that makes sense to them, but offer no evidence. A sentence to illustrate follows an explanation of “convergence” and gives a consequence of law firms that “begin to operate as long-term partners, offering cost efficiencies and improved service as a result of their wider knowledge.” Sounds…