Managing Legal Straight Talk on Law & Lawyers for Senior Executives and their Boards
by Someone Who's Worked on Both Sides of the Attorney / Client Divide

Articles Posted in Alternative Legal Services Providers (ALSPs)

January 23, 2023

“Segmentation”: Fit Law Firm, In-House Staff, Other Legal Resources to the Risk / Opportunity Your Business Faces

by Joel A. Webber

shutterstock_1772122742-300x200

The Point

I once asked Ben W. Heineman, Jr., legendary GE General Counsel under Jack Welch during the years I served as an executive at GE: “What’s the one key to managing resources in a company’s law function?”

Heineman’s unhesitating reply: “Segment! Segment! Segment!”

As he explains in his book, The Inside Counsel Revolution:

” … Law departments must prioritize and segment the work (his emphasis) from routine with low risk, to recurrent with moderate risk, to repeating cases with high risk, to one-off consequential cases, to one-off potentially catastrophic or transformative matters.” Continue reading

October 7, 2022

Alternative Legal Services Providers are 3 to 7X More Cost-Efficient than Law Firms in Process-Based Legal Work

by Joel A. Webber

shutterstock_1456360541-300x175

The Point

The default mode for law firms consists of custom-made work, done manually by one or more attorneys, in response to a one-off request. That’s been true for decades — and it remains true as law firms deploy recent law graduates at hundreds per hour to do low-level grunt work in aid of more highly compensated law partners.

Meanwhile, given intense legal and regulatory demands, corporate law functions struggle to bridge the gap between the resources they have and the ones they need. Absent an unlimited Legal budget, simply assigning more lawyers is not sustainable.

Rachael Pikulski of Bloomberg Law reported in July that, despite the break-through solution they present to corporate law departments, alternative legal services providers (ALSPs) are “being used for a relatively small proportion of an organization’s workflow, despite the specialized services and cost-saving potential ALSPs offer.” Continue reading