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Ron Friedmann on December 15th, 2009 at 8:08 am :
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We recently came across a fabulous video (a Flash animation) by Beaton Consulting, which is “Australia’s leading B2B services research and consulting firm, providing insights to drive business performance.”
In just under three minutes, “The Big (Legal) Picture” provides a great perspective on the current and future global legal market, including legal process outsourcing (LPO). We think this illustrates graphically that the LPO trend is just beginning.
This is a ’must see’ for anyone in the legal profession. Beyond the content, we have seldom seen such high ‘production values’ in the legal market. (Click on the arrow in the video box below to watch.)
As a quick side note, we have observed that in the last couple of years, video and animation have evolved into a major phenomenon for the consumer and business markets. In keeping with this trend, we have recently set up our own LPO channel on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/IntegreonLPO.
A dynamic legal landscape. Economic pressures and the changing regulatory environment will continue to put pressure on organisations to turn to outside vendors.
Alternative legal delivery. Traditional delivery of legal services are unbundled allowing firms to offer clients new, streamlined services and create greater efficiencies.
Shift in focus. Legal organisations will take a more strategic approach to their outsourcing arrangements as opposed to an ad hoc, cost-focused approach.
Expanded work flow. Projected increases in litigation and rising economic activity will prompt organisations to source more work to LPO vendors.
A proving opportunity. In 2009, legal outsourcing caught the media limelight. 2010 will be the acid test for the legal outsourcing industry, when it must prove its value to new consumers.
Engagement structures. For 2010, the primary avenue for law firms and corporate legal teams to participate in outsourcing arrangements will be through third-party vendors and virtual captives.
Emerging sourcing destinations. The leading LPO location India, will face competition from emerging nations like South Africa and the Philippines.
Dynamic vendor landscape. Increased competition as traditional business process outsourcing (BPO) providers ramp up their LPO capacity. Mid-size LPO providers face a choice between consolidation and specialisation.
Talent Development and Migration. As legal outsourcing vendors gain prominence in 2010, they will have much greater access to talent as more lawyers consider outsourcing as a genuine career path.
Industry Transparency. 2010 will mark an increased focus on transparency that will result in more efficient markets and heightened credibility of legal outsourcing initiatives for both buyers and vendors.
By and large, we agree with these predictions. We have discussed many of these trends and reasons behind them in prior posts so will limit our comments here to one point. On the prediction “Emerging sourcing destinations”, I would add onsite and onshore destinations to the list. From the our vendor perspective, we see strong interest, in both the US and UK, in a mix of destinations, including onsite, onshore, offshore, and multi-shore.
Out only a few days now, Fronterion’s predictions have already garnered press coverage:
On a related note, Michael Bell of Fronterion, the author of this list also wrote a recent major LPO study, Implementing a Successful Legal Outsourcing Engagement, published by Managing Partner, an Ark Group property. This is in-depth study provides extensive background on outsourcing considerations and practice and contains numerous helpful case studies. My colleague Mark Ross and I each contributed short sections; in addition, Integreon client Osborne Clarke is the topic of a case study.
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Ron Friedmann on December 2nd, 2009 at 10:24 am :
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In November, I spoke at the Ark Group Conference on Alternative Fee Arrangements (AFA). My Unbundling Repetitive Aspects of Large Matters presentation tried to de-mystify and simplify AFA, which has become a very hot legal market topic. Here are the presentation highlights.
Inside and outside counsel would find AFA easier if, instead of thinking about entire matters, they considered the components of big matters. By big matters I mean single large matters such as major litigation or an M&A deal or “portfolio” matters such as real estate transactions, sales contracts, or NDAs.
These big matters typically include high volume, repetitive elements that can be treated as fairly discrete activities and therefore costed and priced separately. Here are some examples of common “discrete activities:”
Matter Type
High Volume Elements
Litigation
- -Document review
- -Motions
Deal
- -Due diligence
- -Employment contracts
Real Estate
- -Environmental review
- -Lease agreements
Sales contract
- -Drafting and execution
- -Manage rights and obligations
NDA
- -Standard language
- -Managing
The key to achieving workable alternate fees for both clients and firms is to unbundle these and other high volume tasks and treat them as discrete activities. Doing so can lower the cost and improve the predictability. All that’s needed is to apply the appropriate mix of process, technology and human resources:
By unbundling - that is, by separating matters into discrete “chunks of work” - and using the tools above, tracking costs and effort, and monitoring and repeating the process to refine estimates, clients and lawyers likely will find that they reduce cost and, as important, make cost more predictable. That in turn should make AFA much easier.
I was not ‘wearing my vendor’ hat when presenting so mentioned legal process outsourcing (LPO) only in passing. Of course, I do think that lawyers will increasingly turn to LPO services as they move to alternate fees. Lower cost is only part of the inevitable attraction. The process, QC, and predictability of LPO services also support AFA. In fact, the process approach of LPO may end up informing how lawyers think about the work that they only they can do.
This post originally appeared at my personal blog, Strategic Legal Technology. For recent news and blog posts on AFA, see the following:
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Ron Friedmann on November 17th, 2009 at 10:25 am :
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Economic hardship has forced general counsels to cut costs. Most large law firms have, in turn, laid-off lawyers and staff and acquiesced to demands for alternative fee arrangements. Some firms are also actively re-shaping their “value propositions”; for example, many firms aim to become end-to-end e-discovery providers.
UPS Cuts Costs With E-Discovery Counsel (Corporate Counsel, 11 Nov 2009), describes King & Spalding’s “cradle-to-grave solution” for e-discovery at UPS. Separately, off-the-record reports suggest that many law firms want to provide an integrated, one-stop e-discovery solution for clients. This is a big change; previously, most firms were content merely to counsel clients on the law, rely on vendors to do the work, and supervise the overall process.
Firms likely will succeed in this only if they partner with EDD vendors. Law firms have the advantage in counseling clients on legal strategy and e-discovery issues. When it comes to providing integrated e-discovery service, however, law firms have several disadvantages relative to vendors:
Art vs. Industry. BigLaw has long asserted that “everything we do is art” and cannot be standardized. That mentality works against the industrial strength processes (e.g., rigorous metrics and QC) and disciplined project management that high-quality and cost-effective e-discovery service requires.
Sub-scale. Most law firms simply do not have the necessary scale to flex up and down to manage the peaks and troughs of e-discovery processing / hosting and document review. Large vendors can better manage the fluctuations because they aggregate demand across multiple firms and clients. Scale also limits most firms’ ability to stay on the leading edge of EDD technology by developing proprietary technology and/or evaluating and running multiple third-party platforms.
Declining Unit Pricing. E-discovery and document review is moving to unit pricing that is declining over time. Vendors don’t like falling prices but have mechanisms to cope. BigLaw partners, in contrast, have enough trouble moving beyond the billable hour much less lowering fees. Law firm DNA makes it hard to deal with the current EDD trends.
Scarce Investment Capital. Exploding data volumes require ever more servers and software licenses. That means capital. Law firm investment has typically meant “any outlay that cannot be billed to to a client in the same month.” Law firms have never been well-capitalized and, in the current economic environment, loans are difficult to obtain and costly. So it’s not clear how firms will fund growing their EDD infrastructure and keeping it state of the art. Well-managed and well-capitalized vendors are accustomed to on-going investment to keep and grow business.
Nonetheless, I think that law firms will continue to play a critical role in managing clients’ EDD requirements. Their best path is to focus on their core legal strength and their deep relationship with clients. For the heavy lifting of e-discovery and document review, most firms will find it easiest and best to partner with vendors.
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Ron Friedmann on November 2nd, 2009 at 5:34 pm :
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For decades large law firms in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia followed similar strategies. Will that uniformity change given the recent economic and legal market turmoil?
We have not yet reached a new legal market equilibrium and already see more variation in strategy. The uncertain environment means that firm management must consider more options. Smart firms will, in our view, differentiate and tell the market what they are doing.
In this post, we first review market differentiation, explain why going public makes sense, and illustrate with recent announcements by Integreon clients Osborne Clarke and Simmons & Simmons.
The Legal Market is Differentiating
Once the legal market settles down from the recession, we don’t think it will look the same. We agree with Adam Smith, Esq.’s (aka Bruce MacEwen) premise in Law Firm Business Models: A New Series (30 October 2009) that the market is moving from a “mono-strategy” to a diverse environment. He concludes that, “we may begin to see a wealth of experimentation with different business models.”
For example, consider recent news about change in lawyer pay. Associate career tracks and pay were virtually identical across AmLaw 200 firms in the US for decades. No more. This past week, separate articles reported that Reed Smith and Drinker Biddle abandoned associate lock-step compensation in favor of associate categories and merit-based pay. Howrey, Bingham McCutchen, and Orrick have also made similar moves.
Another example is the rise of smaller firms. The legal press has reported about both BigLaw spin-offs and the relative success of regional firms. Whether these threaten BigLaw is not the point, rather it’s that clients now consider a broader range of legal providers.
Or consider the Legal Week editorial last week. Alex Novarese, in Editor’s Comment: The original LPOs, reminds us that in the 1990s, regional UK firms tried to capture share from higher-end London firms. He argues that the time is ripe to try again but notes that:
“At the top reaches of the global market there is now stratification, not consolidation. That means top firms are refining their practices, a process that increasingly sees them strip down their business rather than expand.”
This further supports the idea that the market has changed, that firms are no longer all playing from the same sheet of music, and that competition and differentiation have increased.
Successful Differentiation Requires Talking About It Publicly
We are surprised to read about some law firm changes as press leaks rather than public announcements. For example, Above the Law recently “broke” news about the The New Biglaw Business Model, According to O’Melveny & Myers, which described the firm’s strategy to become a leader in fixed fee billing.
Firms should, of course, have internal and private client discussions. We think they should also publicly announce new strategies. Clients clearly say they want more value from firms. A public announcement that explains how a firm will deliver more value helps position the firm to retain existing clients and win new business.
Until recently, most firms using legal outsourcing eschewed PR. Today, however, firms recognize that their clients equate outsourcing with better value. Firms that might once have taken steps quietly now announce their moves, recognizing the positive impact on clients…
Two weeks ago Integreon client Simmons & Simmons announced that legal process outsourcing - a team of lawyers in India - was an important part of its new strategy (see The Lawyer article or the Integreon press release).
Last week, Osborne Clarke managing partner Simon Beswick wrote an opinion piece in the The Lawyer, Outsourcing will enhance careers, not hinder them. Readers may recall that OC signed a major Middle Office outsourcing deal with Integreon early in 2009 (see our February press release and October news of two recent prestigious awards). Beswick addresses concerns that outsourcing hurts lawyer careers, making the point that firms need a clear strategy for how they will meet client demands to deliver better value and that outsourcing is one part of the solution.
We think Beswick’s concluding remarks apply well beyond outsourcing to any new law firm strategy:
“The market is demanding that lawyers now embrace change rather than simply adapt to it. Clients are looking to their firms to come up with innovative solutions and law firms that do not move with the times will be left behind by their more willing competitors.”
Firms are clearly making both strategic and tactical moves. We expect that to continue. And we think the ones willing to go public gain an advantage in winning the war both for new talent and new clients.
In our June post Legal Outsourcing Tipping Point? we suggested that the publicity surrounding Rio Tinto’s legal outsourcing reflected a tipping point for the legal process outsourcing (LPO) market. We think this NLJ article puts more weight on the scale to tip the market.
For years (literally) most legal media articles about LPO questioned outsourcing and raised caution flags. Many quoted large law firm partners as skeptics (honestly held views to be sure but unfounded in our opinion). Then came this summer’s articles about Rio Tinto merely reporting the facts of an outsourcing deal. Today’s NLJ article may represent a further shift: from skeptics, the legal media are now virtually advocates.
The article explains the proposed federal Financial Regulatory Reform, that it would increase corporate compliance cost, and that general counsels should consider using offshore lawyers to do some of the work. The article is by an executive at one of our fellow LPOs so it will not surprise readers that we agree with it. With the proverbial foot in the door, we suggest opening it a bit wider.
Specifically, the logic in the article applies equally to any heavily regulated area. That is, there is a lot of relatively routine legal work associated with many regs and such work is in the sweet spot of legal outsourcing. And when we say ‘legal outsourcing’, we choose these words specifically because ‘offshoring’ is too limited a view of legal outsourcing. Onshore outsourcing is another option and, in our experience, some US and UK lawyers are more comfortable with the onshore option or a blend of on- and offshore teams.
The shift in thinking by both lawyers and the media does not surprise us. Beyond the passage of time, which helps the legal market digest all things new, the economic crisis has forced corporations to reduce costs. Legal outsourcing is one of the low hanging fruits.
A ValueNotes May 2009 report, Legal Services Outsourcing: What Do Law Firms Think?, provides insight into what large US and UK law firms think about offshoring and outsourcing. ValueNotes (“VN”) is a respected analyst firm that has followed legal outsourcing for several years. Many VN findings match our own market assessment, our customer feedback and recent broader trends we see in the LPO industry. We do, however, have differing views on some of the VN findings. This post highlights key report findings and shares our perspective on them.
How ValueNotes Conducted the Survey
VN conducted online and telephone surveys of both firms that offshore and those that do not. In all, about 100 lawyers responded with about 30 from firms with over 1000 lawyers, 50 from firms with between 300 and 1000 lawyers, and 20 from firms with fewer than 300 lawyers.
ValueNotes Findings and Integreon Comments
LPO Penetration is Low. VN found that offshoring still has fairly low penetration among law firms; less than 3% of firms in a random sample had tried offshoring. On the one hand, low penetration is not surprising given that the LPO industry is still nascent. On the other hand, 3% seems very low to us. We wonder whether this finding is an artifact of asking individual lawyers rather than institutions. Already four years ago, The American Lawyer reported that 6% of AmLaw 200 firms offshored work (see Law Firm Leaders: Conservatively Optimistic, Dec 2005). While it is understandable that only 3% of lawyers offshore, based purely on Integreon’s own customers, we know that many US and UK law firms do offshore.
Onshore Outsourcing is More Common. Though the volume of offshoring VN found is lower than reported in other surveys and than many may have expected, the report notes that total outsourcing volume is higher because onshore outsourcing is more common (especially if one considers use of contract lawyers as outsourcing, which seems sensible to us). We think onshore outsourcing is a key point. Take document review for example, where outsourcing is well established onshore. Integreon currently has as many onshore review projects running as we have running offshore.
Our view is that LPO is a global phenomenon. Customers consider project complexity, availability of talent, business continuity, degree of real time communication, cost, and scalability in deciding on location. In our experience, only a small portion of the market is dogmatic about location; the vast majority let business requirements drive the location decision.
Cost Savings is the Main Driver. For those firms that do offshore work, VN found that cost savings is the main driver, followed by client pressure. VN notes that these two factors are, by and large, the same. Our experience is that pressure from corporate law departments has historically been the overwhelming driver for law firms. Until now, the typical law firm response has been to react to a request from a client. Some progressive law firms, however, are now proactively assessing and engaging LPOs so that that they can present alternative delivery and cost models to their clients.
We also see that many of our customers, both law firms and law departments, focus on more than just cost savings. VN also found that firms that do offshore recognize offshoring benefits beyond cost savings, including satisfying client pressure and improving turnaround time.
What Customers Seek in an LPO. VN found that customers of offshore services seek a provider with deep management and domain expertise, good references, end-to-end services, the ability to scale, and onshore / global delivery capability. These findings are consistent with our own experiences.
We think it is also important to note that legal outsourcing works best when it is not about “lifting and shifting” a function from a high cost location to a lower cost location. That is, the benefits are not merely labor cost arbitrage. A mature LPO operates based on established processes that provide a consistent, repeatable framework for quality and workflow, performance measurement and continuous improvement. Lawyers are, in our opinion, too quick to overlook or discount the “process” component of “legal process outsourcing”. Clearly not all legal work is suited to a process orientation. Much is, however, and we find lawyers tend to under-rate the value of process engineers, Six Sigma Black Belts and technology experts that are integral to mature an LPO offering – until they’ve worked with us.
Lack of Awareness is Biggest Reason Not to Offshore. The biggest reason law firms cite for not offshoring – 85% of firms – is lack of awareness of offshoring or no perceived need to do so. We find that hard to believe. LPO has been around for 5 years and there’s been plenty of hype (including many articles about LPO in both the legal trade press and mainstream media). The economic dynamic started to change a year ago and major corporate clients have been banging the drum for efficiencies for a considerable time. That said, it can be dangerous to assume lawyers are informed because of the volume of articles. For example, even today many US litigators remain under-informed about modern e-discovery rules and practice, a widely reported topic.
Security Concerns. Other reasons for not offshoring include satisfaction with onshore outsourcing and prior unsatisfactory experience with offshoring. Also, about 8% of firms cite data security and confidentiality concerns for not offshoring. In our view, firms can easily allay these concerns by assessing a provider’s facilities, security, and procedures. VN notes that firms with more extensive offshoring experience say that “client confidentiality and client conflict are not major concerns.” The recent ABA Opinion Formal Opinion 08-451 [see our blog post ABA: Legal Outsourcing is Salutary and Ethically Allowable] bears this out. VN notes that firms with more extensive offshoring experience say that “client confidentiality and client conflict are not major concerns.”
Separately, Integreon, along with other reputable LPOs, meet stringent ISO information security standards. Many LPOs (well over 100) have sprung up over the last few years since barriers to entry are low. Only a few, however, have the process expertise, management systems and security infrastructure to support demanding legal work. So it is no small wonder that law firms that may not have conducted careful provider due diligence would have had a bad experience.
Quality Concerns. Some firms that tried offshoring were not satisfied with the quality. We suspect that most of these instances were ad hoc, projects that were not properly planned or executed. Deep domain expertise is a critical component of most successful outsourcing, wherever the location. Most of the major activity in the LPO market is a result of long-term strategic decision making; these customers recognize the investment to be made and value to be extracted from proper and thorough documentation of workflow, quality testing, implementation and transitioning, to set the strongest foundation for success. [For example, one of our multi-year agreements with a client supports multiple litigations with as many as 100 offshore lawyers working on their matters at any one time]
In our opinion, the “quality issue” is a perception not grounded in fact. Quality should, of course, be at the top of every diligence check list. Saving 50% on cost is false economy if the quality is not right. A reputable LPO should be able to demonstrate understanding of the components of quality. And not just with a blanket statement about “US or UK lawyers checking the work” but with a commitment to quality and a culture of quality from recruitment to process to audit to management, etc.
Customer due diligence should reveal whether it’s real. There are many ways to test quality – thorough diligence, references, tests (pre-pilots), and pilots to name a few. And a reputable LPO should be able to demonstrate that it has auditable, defensible documented processes and a performance metrics system which accurately monitors and ensures quality. It’s also important to remember that quality is a moving target; for that reason, we have a formal Six Sigma process. We note that every LPO pilot we have run met the pre-established quality standards.
Document Review Dominates Offshore Work. For firms that do offshore, VN found that document review is the most popular function to send offshore. This is consistent with our experience. We continue to see document review driving LPO - offshore, onshore and dual shore - from both law firms and corporations. Many major law firms have experienced offshore document review, not as direct customers but at the insistence of their corporate clients. Many have seen it first hand and have become convinced of its efficacy because of what they see in their own layer of quality control. Some of our law department customers have directly compared our reviews with their outside law firm on a blind basis and found ours superior. Obviously it’s not because we have better lawyers offshore than the law firms do onshore, but because we have a proven, repeatable, measured industrial process to recruiting, training, performing and auditing the work, including implementing technologies, which assist or automate the work.
The Conclusions We Draw
We find the ValueNotes report to be very useful. While we take issue with some of the specific findings, the report certainly raises many of the issues lawyers should consider in offshoring.
And any quibbles notwithstanding, it is certainly true that many lawyers are skeptical about both offshoring and outsourcing. We think this will change. Our management team has decades of experience managing within large law firms and corporate legal departments and know that in the legal market, any new way of working takes years to penetrate. Firms take time to gain comfort with new ways of working; indeed, it takes time to use those ways effectively and achieve the desired quality. For example, for many years in the 1990s, a majority of lawyers and firms either did not understand why e-mail might be useful or actively thought it was not required.
Times change and eventually so do firms. The economic reality today creates huge external and internal pressures for law firms. Clients demand better value, which puts pressure on rates and revenues. This squeezes profits, which puts the high overhead of law firms under the spotlight, perhaps in a way not seen previously. Offshoring / outsourcing commoditized aspects of law practice is among the easier ways law firms have to improve their value proposition. Similarly, outsourcing middle office operations is an effective method to reduce cost.
The legal market is slow to “tip” to a new way of working. But when it does, it tips quickly. We think in the current environment, the tipping point is upon us.
[ Update 29 June 2009: The PosseList blog also commented on this subject. PosseList is a thoughtful and insightful blog focusing on contract lawyers in the US and often comments on broader legal market trends. ]
Legal outsourcing has made mainstream and legal media news for years. There are so many articles that we no longer blog about each one. Two items in the Times Online last Thursday (18 June 2009) however, caught our eye. A major multi-national has gone public about legal process outsourcing to slash its legal spend by 20%.
Spence reports that “Rio Tinto has hired a team of lawyers in India to try to reduce its annual £60 million legal bill by 20 per cent.” It is working with an LPO to recruit a team of 12 lawyers in India to “work for it on tasks such as reviewing documents and drafting contracts.” Rio expects to have 24 Indian lawyers within one year.
Susskind writes “the Rio Tinto deal suggests that imaginative pricing may not fully fix the more-for-less dilemma. Lawyers will need to go further and source their work differently, often by using less costly labour to do routine legal work…. People often assume that outsourcing and the options are applicable only to high-volume, low-value legal work. The Rio Tinto deal confirms this is wrong.”
The Rio deal adds to the list - literally - of corporations that offshore or outsource work. At least 15 companies have publicly stated that they offshore work to outsourcers or to their own offshore operations (see Outsourced Legal Services list at Prism Legal, a personal site I maintain).
So Rio is just one more company offshoring. Or is it? Specifically, this deal is announced with the intent of significant cost cutting and that feels new. More generally, markets tip when the new and exotic become accepted and common. Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm provides one framework for thinking about how markets adopt new approaches. Well before his work, however, economists modeled adoption of new high tech products (e.g., Polaroid cameras or Xerox-brand copiers) with S-shaped curves: slow ramp up followed by sudden acceleration.
The continuous (smooth) S-curve may not be a good fit for legal. Instead, a discontinuous step-shaped function may apply. Consider legal market adoption of e-mail, document management, marketing, lateral partner moves, or mergers. For each, there seemed to be only a few firms doing it and then, quite suddenly, many or all were. The “step function” reflects law firm decision making: the first few adopters change slowly, gingerly, and quietly. Firms want to follow. Once a half-dozen to a dozen have led by adopting the new thing, “the coast is clear” and the rest rush in.
Unfortunately, like calling the bottom of a recession (or the top of the market), it’s much easier to recognize the tipping point after the fact. Working for an LPO may distort my view but it feels like legal outsourcing is at a tipping point. Of course, we won’t know for some time. Whether the market tips this year or beyond though, I am confident that, as with e-mail, marketing, etc., we will look at outsourcing and offshoring and have forgotten what all the fuss was about. Just like we did for so many other legal market changes.
In difficult times, law firms need to consider innovative ideas. The April 2009 issue of Law Practice Management magazine (an ABA publication) published Signs of Innovative Life in the Practice of Law, a compendium of ideas by several authors. Integreon’s Ron Friedmann wrote two of the pieces: On-site Staffing and Optimizing Virtual Collaboration. Other authors tackle topics such as work-life balance, project management, and strategic planning.
My colleagues and I were excited to see Incisive Legal Intelligence (formerly ALM Research) release a legal outsourcing study. We thought The Law Deparment Legal Outsourcing Study, 2008 would quantify the rapid growth of legal process outsourcing (LPO).
In fact, it focuses exclusively on law departments outsourcing legal work to law firms. Incisive found that general counsels (GC) outsourced 40% of legal spend in 2008, down from 46% in 2007. The study does not quantify other law department outsourcing such as e-discovery.
With GCs outsourcing so much, we wonder why some seem nervous about legal process outsourcing, that is using a company like Integreon for managed review service, e-discovery, contract review and management, or legal research.
Many lawyers conflate “outsource” with “offshore”. While we think offshore is a fine option, we and other LPOs offer onshore service as well. Perhaps GC misgivings are more about the type of resource than the location. Other than inertia, it’s hard to understand GC reluctance to expand the already broad scope of law department outsourcing by deploying more LPO services.
Law departments can reduce costs by explicitly acting as general contractors to solve company legal problems. Like any GC (general contractor that is, not general counsel), a law department should consider what resources it employs full time and what it sub-contracts. With this mindset, law departments would select a broader range of resources that better meet corporate objectives.
Law department management consultant Rees Morrison notes in Three reasons why legal departments are better positioned to negotiate arrangements with suppliers (15 April 2009) that (1) GC have more bargaining power than law firms, (2) GC are more motivated than firms to save money, and (3) GC can provide better direction to sub-contractors than can firms. Morrison’s blog post further supports the idea of GC = “general contractor” as well as “general counsel.”
In our own business, we do see GCs act as general contractors. Fortune 50 and FTSE 100 law departments use our managed litigation document review and contract review services. They know they must deliver the best solutions at the lowest cost so they assemble the right teams and resources, including our services. A general contractor approach to meeting corporate legal needs is one of the easiest and least painful way to get more bang for the buck.