Kevin O’Keefe, an expert in all things having to do with lawyers online, disputes part of my post about LinkedIn and its law firm members (See my post of Jan. 20, 2009: find out more about law firms through LinkedIn.). I thank him for pushing me to review what I…
The 2005 issue of Robert Half Legal’s Future Law Office report, “Client Service: Challenges and Strategies,” at 9, cites a Canadian article on business intelligence software (BI software) used by law firms. The article says “many law firms are adopting business intelligence software to run their practices and identify new…
A post of November 24th on Kevin O’Keefe’s excellent Lexblog praises LinkedIn. “LinkedIn [has attracted] hundreds of thousands of practicing lawyers and corporate counsel. Every major law firm in the country has a LinkedIn profile providing detailed demographic information.” A touch exaggerated, but it suggests that LinkedIn has penetrated the…
Earlier I argued that a fully loaded in-house counsel hourly rate of $200, as reported in a survey, might actually be considerably higher if we could dig into its derivation and calculation (See my post of Jan. 16, 2009: attack on cost per inside lawyer hour.). What then about the…
According to a recent survey that collected 2007 data from several hundred law departments, their median fully-loaded in-house cost was slightly over $200 an hour. The report explains that it calculated this figure by dividing total inside spending per attorney for each company by the average annual chargeable hours per…
In the ACC Docket, Vol. 26, Nov. 2008 at 34, the author states his conviction that his company’s retention of plaintiffs’ firms to bring lawsuits against other companies has been groundbreaking. Put modestly, it “can also be seen as a signal moment in a major legal profession trend, in which…
A long article in the ACC Docket, Vol. 26, Nov. 2008 at 30, thunders that a law department fares better in litigation if it “makes winning in an out of court the fundamental priority in dealing with all – repeat, all – cases that lack merit.” Joseph Speelman, joseph.speelman@lyondellbasell.com, the…
LyondellBasell has agreements with certain outside firms to pay them a “negotiated annual fee for handling all litigation in specified areas such as toxic tort and personal injury litigation,” as further described in an article in the ACC Docket, Vol. 26, Nov. 2008 at 35. The firms and the company…
In the midst of a paean to “millions for defense, not a penny for tribute,” an article by Joseph Speelman in the ACC Docket, Vol. 26, Nov. 2008 at 34, quotes a litigation partner: The company ensures that he has “all the resources and support” he needs to “assess the…
I have arduously compiled, organized, commented on, indexed, and back-referenced 471 of my posts on outside counsel management. The 290-page PDF blook, which you can find much more about here, costs $75. The six chapters cover (1) when do you need outside counsel, (2) how do you find them, (3)…