To Avoid Being Caught Red-Handed
We have been studying the general counsel surveys for years now, and if there is one aspect of legal engagements we’ve internalized from them, it’s that legal departments often embrace the Skinner-like approach with their law firms when it comes to matters of disengagement or confrontation with firms about pricing and bills that are not up to their standards as memorialized in outside counsel billing guidelines (OCGs). Often, this looks like quiet compromises between general counsel and law firms where the metaphorical “Bart Simpson red hands” is smattered all over a legal bill (non-compliance with OCGs) but the legal department ignores the noncompliance or pays the bill on the promise that the same billing malignments won’t happen again.
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The Evolution of ALSPs into an Invaluable Member of the Legal Ecosystem
While the corporate legal departments and outsourced law firms sometimes perceive aspects of the engagement differently, the unifying aspect of their relationship has always been the adherence to the legal strategy and a matter-centric philosophy. Along these lines, re-imagining the corporate counsel and outside firm relationship around optimized skill matching for each matter will bring the most value out of the relationship. Skill matching historically has been something law firms have handled internally and independently. What has been incredibly interesting is how many law firms are establishing “captive” legal process outsourcing arms (LPOs) or alternative legal service providers (ALSPs) that are owned or affiliates of the law firm to extend their skill matching capabilities
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Re-Evaluating the Relationship between Corporate Legal Departments and Law Firms
Roughly 95% of firms do not internalize the event of not receiving business from a company after an engagement synonymous with being fired from their post. On the flip side, only about half of law departments consider firing an outside firm for a failure to comply with outside counsel guidelines. Ultimately, this distinction causes a few problems for the inside-outside counsel relationship. As matter centricity has become the operating standard for general counsels’ engagements with outside counsel, it’s important that law firms bring their best practices for each and every engagement.
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Top 3 pricing insights to prevent legal budgeting blunders
One of Legal Decoder’s biggest strengths is its capability to surface crucial data from legal invoices, which helps organizations establish strategies for keeping their spend on target. But with each piece of data comes a story that illustrated how the business of law can be innovated upon.
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Informed Pricing for More Accurate Legal Budgets
For decades, it seems like the personnel in charge of creating budgets for legal functions have been working under the same pretenses as HGTV hosts, but now with a stronger grasp on industry prices and rates, the budgeting process can be streamlined substantially.
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Improving the Bankruptcy Fee Review Process
Over the past couple of years Legal Decoder has worked on several high-profile bankruptcies and analyzed hundreds of millions of dollars in fees for the U.S. Trustee’s Office. Along the way we have had the opportunity to observe and provide solutions to the challenges that come with the fee examination process during bankruptcy administration.
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