In October Altman Weil collected responses from what they describe as 176 top corporate lawyers. More than half the participants represented corporations with revenues between $1 billion and $2 billion. Twenty percent had revenue greater than $10 billion. Only one out of three respondents said they “regularly and formally evaluated…
An interview of John Oviatt, chief legal officer of the Mayo Clinic, turned up an interesting tidbit. He said you commonly recognize a pattern of concentration of spending by law departments: “[Y]ou see the number one law firm for many departments receiving in excess of 30 percent of the total…
John Oviatt, chief legal officer of the Mayo Clinic, uses the term “reverse convergence” to mean law departments retaining more law firms rather than converging on fewer firms. In a recent interview, Oviatt calls out two developments that can lead to increases in the number of law firms retained. “One…
In October the consulting firm Altman Weil collected responses from 176 “top corporate lawyers.” The majority represented corporations with revenues between $1 billion and $2 billion, while 20 percent had revenues above $10 billion. For this sample in 2011, the median increase in internal legal budgets was three percent, which…
If a single partner at a law firm accounts for more than 75 percent of the firm’s partner-level billings, it would be safe to say that the partner has the ear of the law department, not the firm as a whole. The more partners bill the client, the deeper the…
Patrick Dransfield, the Publishing Director of Pacific Business Press, suggested another ploy of prestigious firms, and he called it bundling. This blog has referred to unbundling as the practice of taking away from law firms some tasks that others can do better, cheaper, or both. Dransfield sees it like an…
Jeff Schuett, the VP and GM of LexisNexis CounselLink, contributed an article to Met. Corp. Counsel, Nov. 2011 at 30. He writes “Corporate litigation costs have grown 75 percent over the past ten years – even at a time when overall costs rose just 20 percent.” Schuett doesn’t give the…
For several years, law departments with matter management systems have struggled to adapt (contort?) those systems to handle the various volume discount arrangements the departments craft. One law firm might have a tiered discount arrangement, another has very different tiers, while a third triggers retroactive discounts at some level and…
The ALM benchmark survey, released in September, covers 99 companies. The average number of law firms employed in 2010 by the subset of those companies earning between $1 billion and $4.9 billion was 43. Very roughly, that revenue range typically corresponds to 5-25 lawyers in-house. If 10 were the mid-point,…
In a June 2010 report, Jomati Consultants includes a chart to show that U.S. partners put up their rates on average by 4.9 percent each year between 1997 and 2007. Associate rates went up by 5.4 percent on average each of those years. Since a typical U.S. legal department spent…