Some hard-nosed general counsel snort that project management counts as overhead and partners should not charge for the likes of those people. Like practice support specialists at UK firms, they are overhead. Others, who have witnessed the plus side of project management or are more in tune with the benefits…
As a metrics wonk, this abuse of numbers bothers me. I published a post today that quoted a consultancy’s claim that you can “save up to 90 percent” of some alternative course of action. Diet sheds up to 100 pounds! Earn up to $2,000 a day! Pass over up to…
A white paper from Kiersted/Systems discusses whether a law department should replace or restore its matter management system. After a page or two on the total costs incurred by a law department when it replaces its current MMS, the white paper makes a controversial claim: “You will save up to…
Caution, shoals of math ahead before the port of understanding is reached. Assume the effective billing rates of outside counsel run at about 50 percent higher than the fully loaded cost per hour of internal counsel — $330 outside to $210 inside would be unremarkable for many U.S. law departments.…
According to a speaker at a recent conference from the law department of Office Depot, that department opened 7,489 matters in 2010 of which outside counsel assisted with a mere 2.4 percent! That ratio of inside to outside matters seems very low (See my post of May 24, 2011: 30%…
What if a law department took the 12-to-20 law firms it most commonly turns to and calculated the percentage of the firm’s revenue that comes from the department? You know your spend and you can estimate the firm’s revenue from league tables or extrapolations from them. If a firm has…
An article describes a fixed-fee basis arrangement between Brunswick Corp. and K&L Gates. ‘Following the first year of representation, the fixed-fee contract had to be modified in order to provide more protection for the law firm.” Brunswick and K&L Gates agreed to set “a ceiling on fixed fees” and to…
An article says that Applied Discovery defines value as “partnering with clients to achieve their objectives, with thorough cost assessments and efficient project management as methods for aligning cost with value at the very onset: in the bidding stage.” Stated differently, value is working closely and efficiently with clients. Admirable…
If your company operates in a regulated industry and also has unregulated businesses, you may need to track your time so that the allocation of your lawyer’s time is fair to the public. When rate applications go to the regulatory agency, costs of providing the utilities service, for example, are…
Two of my friends, Bruce Heintz and Nat Slavin, both experts in interviewing corporate law departments and clients, reacted to my post on client interviews on behalf of law firms (See my post May 19, 2011: pros and cons of partners or consultants.). I have merged and shortened their comments…