Lee Cheng, the general counsel of Newegg, spoke at the most recent Consero Corporate Counsel Forum. His portion of a panel covered relations with external counsel, including cost management. One bullet on his slides advised that “an excellent reason to terminate a relationship [is] when cost of outside counsel is…
An article in New England In-House, Nov. 2011 at 11, discusses how to prevent runaway legal fees. Most of the article contains plain-vanilla ideas, but the author does mention a confection new to me. He first trundles out the well-accepted technique of a collar on a fixed fee such that…
“Whatever does not add tangible value to client projects is overhead that clients should not be directly or indirectly paying for.” That was the aggressive tagline on a slide by Lee Cheng, the general counsel of Newegg. I did not hear his presentation when Cheng spoke at the most recent…
The most recent Annual Litigation Trends Survey Report of Fulbright & Jaworski presents data on levels of satisfaction the responding companies feel about how well outside counsel meet their litigation needs. Displayed at page 16, the two points that struck me were the critical overall views and the gulf between…
David Wilkins of Harvard Law School gave a presentation a couple of weeks ago where he used a memorable metaphor for a useful idea. Referring to the much greater frequency with which general counsel reduce the work going to a firm rather than terminating the firm, he puckishly drew on…
Michael Caplan, the financial coordinator for Marsh & McLennan’s law department, commented recently in a column about his department’s efforts at outside counsel cost control. “Back in June [2011], we ran a request-for-information on what were the best-in-class outside counsel billing guidelines and how to utilize technology to align to…
A meaty footnote in Michelle Beardsley’s article in the Fordham Law Review, Vol. 79 (2011) at 1924 (fn 314), cites several studies that have highlighted a dramatic drop in the number of trials in the United States. For example, there were roughly 45 percent fewer tort, contract, and real property…
In a recent interview, a senior lawyer at Marsh McLennan, Lucy Fato, recounted some history. “A few years ago, we started examining all the firms that we were using to come up with a preferred provider list in the U.S. and then we rolled it out in the U.K. We’ve…
Corporation Counsel for the city of Chicago has pushed to use no-cost lawyers from some of the larger law firms in the city to alleviate the department’s tight budget. In 2010, the city spent $25 million on outside counsel and something on the order of $37 million (its proposed 2012…
Last year there was news about law department consulting offered by Eversheds and several law firms tout their consulting skills regarding e-discovery. Recently I saw another instance of a law firm that wants to consult to law departments. An ad in the ACC Docket by Seyfarth Shaw promotes how its…