Legal Strat. Rev., Spring 2009 at 26, says “The closest thing to a contingency fee in England is a conditional fee arrangement or ‘no-win, no fee’ deal. Solicitors are then allowed a 100% uplift on their hourly rate if they win the case and receive nothing if they lose. However,…
Wyeth’s corporate legal department employs some 350 law firms, including 90 that submit invoices through the legal department’s e-billing system. My point is that about a quarter of the firms used (90 out of 350 or so) probably accounts for more than three quarters of the department’s spend. More subtly,…
Legal OnRamp had an interesting piece by Jim Hassett (CEO of LegalBizDev). On April 15, 2009, Hassett moderated a panel discussion on alternative fees at large firms. Rob Fields from Womble Carlyle (a US firm of more than 500 lawyers) described a large project Womble Carlyle recently started in which…
PrinceOMC, a UK-based management consultancy providing sourcing consulting to professional services companies, polled over 100 in-house counsel at FTSE100/DJIA30 businesses and leaders in UK and US law firms. According to the press release of PrinceOMC ”The impact of the downturn on law firm’s perceptions of outsourcing or offshoring parts of…
Jeff Carr, the General Counsel of FMC Technologies, announced at the SuperConference that he wants to hear from law firms that would like to participate in the FMC Law Litigation Value Challenge. In his email to me afterwards, he wrote “If firms share our objective of pioneering innovative ways to…
The terms that a law firm agrees to, such as to accept a 25 percent holdback in return for 10 percent of the difference between a $10 million settlement and a $50 million settlement, tells you what the firm thinks of your chances in the lawsuit. Previous posts on this…
Four points occurred to me as I listened to Karen Klein, General Counsel, Kayak.com, during the recent Ninth Annual SuperConference www.insidecounsel.com/superconference. The first point was her observation that law firms should measure revenue on a per-employee basis, as does her company and many other companies. If law firms did so,…
One long-term trend may escape notice: legal departments are steadily stocking more and better data about what it costs outside counsel to handle matters. As David Grumbine, Senior Counsel, Dispute Resolution Group, of Whirlpool Corporation, put it on a panel at the Ninth Annual SuperConference, “Hourly billing rates are irrelevant…
At the Ninth Annual SuperConference, David Grumbine, Senior Counsel, Dispute Resolution Group, of Whirlpool Corporation spoke. “A world without billable hours is our mantra,” Grumbine announced, so he and his 30-person defense team pursue fixed fees whenever they can (See my post of March 1, 2008: fixed or flat fees…
Recently, when Chalco boosted its stake in the Rio Tinto Group, Rio Tinto turned to that Australian firm of Allens Arthur Robinson in the firm’s capacity as legal advisors. As reported in Asian Legal Bus., Vol. 7, April 2009 at 8. Not surprisingly … “The relationship between Allens as external…