The Point Over the weekend I heard a veteran of a Silicon Valley-based, Fortune 100 tech company say this: “When I started, the legal department was 200 people … by the time I left it was 1500 people.” This Matters When its workload increases, the corporate law function has one…
The Point I’m qualified to discern fat-vs-muscle in Legal spending from firsthand experience on both sides of the lawyer / client table. I’ve practiced business law for 25 years, and I ran divisions as a general manager and then served as an M&A executive for 12 years. This Matters To…
The Point Corporate legal costs have risen steadily for the last 40 years (including 2020 — and excluding the Great Recession of 2008 to 2009). Meanwhile, the legal system’s demands on business increase relentlessly. So, CFOs, or other business executives, need to step in and impose spending discipline on the…
THE POINT Reports about pricing “compromises” between law firms and client companies in the wake of Covid-19 simply reflect attorneys’ intransigence about hourly billing — not a real willingness to remove that business model’s waste and cost uncertainties by agreeing in advance the value they promise to deliver for a…
A final installment in this three-part post. What’s a practical basis for placing a value on attorneys’ work for the business? In Part 1 I addressed the legal profession’s prevailing measure of lawyers’ work: How long did the attorney decide to take doing the job? Cost-plus. Bill the client company…
In Part 1 I addressed the need for reliable numbers relating to the value of legal services. If what gets measured gets managed — and if measuring the wrong thing is worse than measuring nothing at all — then client company executives need a reliable measure of the value of…
“What gets measured gets managed.” This proverb, widely attributed to Peter Drucker, presents a tough question in the context of a company’s legal budget:Measure what, exactly?The cost-plus pricing method of the legal profession’s business model — charging the client company according to hours billed — offers the following answer:You should measure…
This four-part post’s premise: A company’s “legal” problems are likely to be — in functional terms — business problems that have a legal aspect. The traditional impulse to call in a licensed attorney from a law firm or in-house counsel department doesn’t always lead client companies to the most practical…
OK. Review of Part 1 and Part 2 of this four-part post: 1. In your company, many “legal” problems are more accurately viewed as business challenges that raise legal issues (as Mark Cohen put it). 2. Delivery of many of the legal services that respond to such business-challenges-that-raise-legal-issues now requires process…
I interrupt my four-part post on how a company can achieve higher quality legal services, that are faster, more accurate — and cheaper — by “disaggregating” business challenges that raise legal issues into tasks that (often) someone other than an attorney can do better than a lawyer (“Clients Need Legal…