Most partners need considerable nudging from their clients if they are going to commit to fixed-fee billing. An article in the ABA J., Vol. 94, July 2008 at 26, gives three suggestions. Choose services that are amenable to fixed fees (See my post of March 1, 2008 – 36 references…
Bill approval is a pain in the neck. That said, if an inside lawyer wants to focus his or her attention, answer these four questions about a bill. A. For the results and work accomplished during the month, do the fees seem reasonably related to the value delivered? This is…
Attendees at a recent conference excoriated their law firms on efficiency. Voting on electronic pads with a scale from 1 low to 5 high, “87% of them gave their law firms a 1 or 2 on efficiency and not a single in-house lawyer rated them a 4 or 5 for…
Many in the US legal industry probably believe that big law departments mostly hire big law firms. After all, deep pockets face more lawsuits, for more millions of dollars, and on more cutting-edge transactions than do their smaller competitors. Accordingly, they routinely turn to law firms with hundreds, nay thousands,…
At Respironics, a $1.2 billion manufacturer of respiratory medical products, nine lawyers and three support personnel make up the internal legal department. According to the company’s general counsel, quoted in GC Mid-Atlantic, June 2008 at 9, that team handles “probably 90 percent of our non-international, non-litigation work internally.” Economists call…
Intriguingly, the Ethisphere Institute offers to complete a Code of Conduct analysis using its methodology and ratings on 57 elements. As described in Ethisphere, Qtr. 2, 2008 at 13, each of eight critical components has a weighting and they aggregate the scores of experts on those ratings. Perhaps someone will…
All the techniques in the world for outside-counsel cost control make barely a dent unless the in-house lawyers who direct firms willingly set their shoulders to the yoke. The hard pulls of choosing not to retain counsel, but if so of then choosing a good but lesser-known and less costly…
My recent post on the importance of “trust” in relation to law firms (See my post of June 20, 2008.) spurred Andrew Shipley, Assistant General Counsel – Litigation for Northrop Grumman Corporation, to respond. He disagrees with my interpretation of the term as a paternalistic relationship between unequals. Shipley makes…
The discipline of evolutionary economics “looks at the economy as an ever-changing, complex adaptive system—not unlike that of biological evolution. Immune systems, language, the law, and the Internet are all examples of other complex adaptive systems. They learn and grow from the bottom up.” This grand concept from Fast Co.,…
A law department I encountered tracks bill write downs by practice groups. The general counsel periodically publicizes the amounts that lawyers in different groups collectively knock off bills from law firms. Lawyers being the competitive types that they are, everyone pays attention to the league table and presumably sharpens their…