In several speeches I have presented a form of the following list. My contention is that these methods to limit the costs of external firms have yet to be proven effective. 1. Offshore lawyers and resources (See my post of Nov. 4, 2007 with some charges leveled against legal process…
A survey conducted by the Legal Electronic Data Exchange Standard (LEDES) Oversight Committee received responses from 121 law firms. The Committee’s report, released in March, 2007, contains mostly criticisms by law firms about the present state of affairs and damns electronic billing(See my posts of Nov. 28, 2007 on billing…
At least 17 vendors of e-billing software have been identified by the Legal Electronic Data Exchange Standard (LEDES) Oversight Committee (See my post of Nov. 20, 2007 with its invitation for survey respondents.). There may be others, because those were the vendors encountered only by the two law firms that…
My article about how to learn more from your law-firm invoices explains 13 ways to squeeze more insights from them (See my post of Dec. 11, 2006.). Since the publication of that article, I have written eight more posts on invoice review and related topics (See my posts of Jan.…
By contributing author Jane DiRenzo Pigott, R3 Group LLC jdpigott@r3group.net The Women’s Law School Coalition is a consortium of the women’s groups at Boalt (Berkeley), Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, Northwestern, Virginia and Yale law schools. They recently published a list of the top 50 family-friendly law firms. The list was developed…
Early this year, the Legal Electronic Data Exchange Standard (LEDES) Oversight Committee released survey data from 121 law firms. The report notes (at 11) that “24% of respondents have successfully retained a client after refusing to electronically bill at all.” The report offers no explanation for this fairly high percentage…
Competitive bid processes by law departments to choose counsel have appeared many times in posts on this blog. It is time, therefore, to collect some of my suggestions for how best to carry out such a process. 1. Give as many facts as possible in the RFP (See my post…
By contributing author Jane DiRenzo Pigott, R3 Group LLC “Law Student Building a Better Legal Profession” (“BBLP”), recently strongly indicated what they find important in an organization at which they will practice law: 1. demographic, 2. billable hours expectations and averages, and 3. pro bono participation. BBLP ranked law firms…
The Legal Electronic Data Exchange Standard (LEDES) Oversight Committee issued a 20-page white paper in March, 2007. Much of the report lays out the responses of 121 law firms to a survey about e-billing. The firms were rambunctious! More than 80 percent of them said that “dealing with billing disputes”…
Legal Week, Vol. 9, Oct. 18, 2007 at 1, describes an ambitious effort to assign a brand value to the world’s largest law firms. A professional services association, The Managing Partners’ Forum (MPF), and a consulting firm, Brand Finance, will evaluate around 200 law firms in the study, which is…