Non-practicing entities (NPEs), which hold patents but make no products, have profited from suing practicing entities. Trolls versus companies, you can think of it. The Economist, Aug. 20, 2011 at 58, has a chart (from which I eyeballed the metrics that follow) based on PricewaterhouseCoopers data that shows median damages…
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…
Late in 2009, while the U.S. economy was in the tank and cost control was the cry of the day, The American Lawyer and the Association of Corporate Counsel surveyed approximately 587 general counsel regarding their use of alternative fee arrangements. Some of the results appear in Lit. Mgt. Mag.,…
A proponent of alternative fee arrangements summarized six “major benefits” of AFAs, one of which set me on the path to this post. The author does not define AFA, but seems to assume everyone knows it as fixed fees for a volume of legal services, primarily litigation. He writes that…
Toward the end of 2009, American Lawyer and the Association of Corporate Counsel conducted a joint survey of approximately 587 general counsel regarding the use of alternative fee arrangements. Some of the findings are cited in Lit. Mgt. Mag., fall 2011 at 58. One out of four of the respondents…
A for/against feature in Lit. Mgt. Mag., fall 2011 at 52, presented one argument against fixed fees that is not often expressed. A claims manager for Merchants Insurance Group dislikes fixed fees for groups of matters because he wants to pay the right amount for each one: “Inherent in the…
I have used the term in my consulting projects for those matters that will NOT be included in the bundle of matters a firm agrees to handle on a fixed fee. So, for instance, class action lawsuits are carved out of the portfolios of litigation, or matters that involve Canadian…
“New technology will naturally drive out the old, which it mimics in functionality and terminology, if the old is no longer available.” The quote comes from Henry Petroski, Success through Failure: the paradox of design (Princeton 2006) at 41. The opposite of Gresham’s Law, where debased coin drives out unalloyed…
Someday we may find that better run companies – whatever that means and however that is measured – tend to have better run law departments – at least as evidenced by their comparative benchmarks. Among mature companies competing in mature industries, it seems likely that their well-honed HR practices, technology…
It is a business commonplace that in the early days of an industry, the market teems with competitors, but equally common that their numbers thereafter shrink markedly. Combinations, withdrawals, failures, and acquisitions narrow the field. It has happened some with matter management systems for law departments but not to the…