Legal Week Intelligence collected data from 317 UK companies, including 54 from the FTSE 100. “The average number of law firms used by the FTSE companies increased from eight to nine since 2003.” This surprising finding comes from Corp. Counsel, Vol. 16, April 2009 at 66. The number of law…
Surveys report widely different figures for the number of law firms retained by large US law departments. A low-end metric comes from the ACC Docket, Vol. 27, April 2009 at 18, and the ACC/Serengeti Managing Outside Counsel Survey. That survey found that law departments with more than 10 lawyers used…
Your law department can get data that rates your primary law firms with regard to their policies and practices pertinent to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) employees. The Human Rights Campaign administers the annual Corporate Equality Index (CEI), which rates law firms on a scale of zero to 100%…
Some law departments assign to each of their primary law firms a senior lawyer, one who should strive for better ways of working between department and firm, better connections across multiple users of the firm, fresh initiatives, pursuit of quality and value improvements. To call that lawyer a “relationship manager”…
The law firms that have represented you for a while have a big edge over other law firms if you conduct a competitive bid that pits them against each other. The incumbent firms know more about your business, your matters, your personnel, your likes and dislikes. In the dark, for…
Perhaps formal evaluations of outside counsel are lemons not worth the squeeze, lots of work, hard to do, a sour taste afterwards. After all, a lawyer who does not like the performance of a firm can stop giving it work. Why bother with the administrivia of written appraisals (See my…
Not to be a zealot about the value of scoring RFP responses, I still advocate as part of the review that evaluators convert responses to comparative scores. If an evaluator reads all of the answers to the same question, one after the other, the evaluator should be able to rank…
One technique general counsel should consider is to segment cases into broad tracks according to their risk and match each track to a set of management activities. Cases in the low oversight track – the majority of cases, which pose no material risks – are handled by outside law firms…
Try having your responsible in-house lawyers rate the performance of your major law firms, using a scale of 1 (Unacceptable), 2 (Mediocre), 3 (Good), 4 (Very Good) and 5 (Excellent) on six attributes. These come from FMC Technologies and you can view the form on Bruce McEwans thoughtful blog. Understand…
Once your law department has selected a firm though a competitive bidding process, there still remains the chore of executing an agreement with the firm. The good news, however, is that the agreement should not take long to finish because you have appended the form of it to the second-round…