Most associations of law firms boast about their size and international reach. The likes of TerraLex, LexMundi, Primerus and others believe that global coverage matters to clients. Other networks stress their regional expertise and footprint. Still other networks of firms orient themselves around specialized areas of law. There are groups…
During late 2009 and much of 2010, U.K. heads of legal showed significant appetite to use more “mid-tier firms” in that country as well as more “international firms.” This shift in reliance for outsourced legal work appears graphically in a Winmark survey of CLO Programme membership (at 13). It is…
Most outside counsel guidelines that I have reviewed make it clear: “You may not comment to the media or disclose your representation of our company.” Even so, I can only conclude from a survey I just saw that some law departments are more tolerant of publicity. The choices included permitted…
Every now and then I run across another association of law firms eager to help law departments in a region, a specialty area of law, or globally (See my post of Feb. 21, 2008 #2: law-firm networks with 7 references; and April 14, 2010: associations with 7 references.). First Law…
An indicator of your law department’s attachment to a law firm is the number of offices of a firm that you work with. According to Baker & McKenzie, it pulled in $2.1 billion in 2010, “half of it from clients that use the firm in ten or more places.” This…
The first experiment with competitive bids for fixed-fee arrangements having been conducted by many law departments, their general counsel contemplate the next round. What can they do differently to improve the process and outcome? All manner of improvements to the RFP process might help. As discussed on this blog, these…
With nearly 7,000 posts under this blogger’s belt, about 6,999 of them have dealt with companies that have a law department – even if only one lawyer (See my post of July 5, 2011: reasons to hire a first lawyer.). Yet thousands of established, profitable and well-run companies have no…
Every law department has a few law firms they view as their stalwarts, their old-reliables, their go-to firms. Sometimes called primary law firms, they are known quantities and qualities – they are the reigning incumbents. A more formal designation, and the more European term, is a panel. My sense of…
Lit. Mgt. Mag., fall 2011 at 59, offers an example of a fixed fee for discovery: “no more than 10,000 documents to review, no more than six fact depositions, no more than two experts named by the opponents and no more than one discovery-related motion filed.” That sounds plausible to…
Always curating my blog, I went back to early 2009 to see since then what this blog has about alternative fee arrangements. Almost three dozen came to light. Of course, a number of the posts had to do with metrics (See my post of Sept. 13, 2006: percentage of matters…