Evaluating law firm performance and giving hard-data feedback to firms (Royal Bank Canada)

This law department has created a “compliance audit review process.” The second part (the first is a routine check whether the firm comports with the bank’s billing policies) assesses what the firm has done in the past year in terms of “value-added servicing: such as co-training and shared technology,

The third step is a “General Performance Questionnaire” distributed to a random selection of people who have retained a given firm during the past year. (It sounds as if clients can retain the firms on their own.) The responses to the 30-to-40 questions (too many in my experience) come back confidentially and are summarized in a spreadsheet. When speaking with the firm, the department thus has more comments to provide, all supported by hard data. Counsel to Counsel, July 2005 at pg. 7