Two paragraphs in a survey report offer some insights into how European law departments use procurement personnel. The data comes from PLCLaw Dept. Quart., Vol. 3, Jan.-March 2007 at 23. Of the respondents to the magazine’s 2006 survey, 18.3 percent of the law departments involved procurement staff, up from 12.9 percent in the 2005 survey. That is a significant increase in a year (See my post of March 1, 2008: procurement with 17 references.)
Of the law departments that turned to procurement for assistance, half of them used the sourcing specialists “to benchmark pitches.” Perhaps that means they used them to extract from the firms’ responses the answers to questions and then to rank those answers. A third of the procurement users had them draw up the Request for Proposal. As to the other two uses, the magazine says that 16.7 percent of the law departments turned to procurement for “general advice” or “fee negotiations.”
Later, at page 25, the article adds that “11% of those who currently do not involve procurement staff intend to involve them in the near future.”