The following is a series of tips gathered from General Counsel running legal departments within international and multinational businesses.
Large law departments have the financial muscle to demand alternative billing arrangements. What can small law departments do to get similar arrangements for outside legal work? Know what to look for and how to get the best deal for your company. What work should be non-billable? Is ebilling right for you? And learn alternatives to straight hourly fees: when to consider discounts, fixed fee work, contingent fees and incentive structures. Don’t overlook control mechanisms such as budgets, staffing and who authorizes work.
If you’re ready to move to value-based fee structures, you probably know that data and metrics are key to determining fee structures and benchmarking your legal spend. In this session, we’ll examine what data is needed to map to a suitable fee structure, and consider data mining techniques and technology options.
Make sure your new value-based fee structures with law firms are successful by focusing on forging long-term relationships, goal alignment, and solid project management. In this session, we’ll discuss how to assess firm project management capabilities, and ways to manage the outside counsel interface over the life of a matter to ensure you are satisfied with outcome. We’ll cover tools and techniques of successful project management, such as defining scope, requirements and milestones up front, conducting progress assessments along the way, ensuring the budget is on track (and how to anticipate and deal with variances), and concluding matters with assessments that foster continuous improvement.
If you’re ready to move to value-based fee structures, you know that you need to collaborate with your outside counsel to drive efficiency. This session will focus on process management – specifically disaggregating processes to determine which pieces can be improved, making sure that legal knowledge is being leveraged (not re-invented), and making better decisions about who should be doing which piece of the work. We’ll examine internal and external staffing options, include out-sourcing and off-shoring, and connect the options to value-based fee structures that you may be considering.
Continue your exploration of value-based fee structure options - looking beyond what was covered in Session 301. We’ll walk through the considerations to weigh when deciding fee structures, focusing on three more popular approaches: portfolio retainers, success/incentive fees, and contingencies. We recommend that you combine this with session 301, to expand your toolkit of options.
This checklist will help determine key quality and organizational provisions for outside counsel retainer agreements.
A sample RFP for legal services.
This is a sample guideline that a company would share with outside counsel after contracting to do business.
Much of the discussion around litigation is focused on companies involved in numerous lawsuits, but the reality is most organizations face few lawsuits of any significance each year. While the litigation landscape has changed in the past few years, what – if anything – should these low-litigation companies do to prepare? Many inside counsel believe they should probably be doing something, but how much preparedness do we really need, and how do we balance this with restrictive budgets? This panel of inside counsel from companies that historically have not had much litigation will address the extent the current litigation landscape in 2010 impacts their planning, what types of activities they are doing to prepare, traps low-litigation companies in particular face, as well as how they developed a business case for senior management for undertaking the readiness activities they pursued.