OMC released a report in November that pulls together a formidable amount of data and analysis on legal process offshoring around the world. London-based OMC specializes in advising law firms and law departments on opportunities to have services provided in lower-cost jurisdictions. Page 15 of the OMC report lays out…
Stephen Nagin, Of Counsel, at Peretz, Chesal & Herrmann, in Miami, Florida, sent this after my post about unbundled, limited services by lawyers. “The ABA model Code of Professional Responsibility never was crafted to deal with unbundling in a comprehensive manner. It protects the guild from unsupervised paraprofessionals. It does…
A stark contrast appeared in a recent survey. Asked to rank five cost-reduction steps in order of importance, one quarter of a group of in-house respondents chose “Hiring freeze or reduction in legal department staff” while at the same time almost the same percentage chose “Hiring in-house counsel or temporary…
The HBR Consulting benchmark survey suggests a guideline for what expenses should be included in a general counsel’s budget. It is something like “Do not include expenses that a company would have to pay even if there were no law department at all.” That sounds constructive, and would eliminate annual…
If you need an expert witness in a case, you can ask the law firm you have retained to locate one, or you can use one of the many services that specialize in finding experts (See my post of Feb. 2, 2008: expert witnesses with 9 references.). When outside counsel…
As a columnist for InsideCounsel’s online site, I most recently wrote about the different ways law departments account for costs associated with patents. Sometimes the legal budget absorbs some of those amounts, other times it doesn’t – and everything in between. If you would like to read the entire column,…
An update on Bloomberg Law, whose second incarnation has recently been rolled out, appears in Law Technology News, Oct. 2011 at 44. Quite different than the complicated pricing of its main competitors, Bloomberg Law charges $450 per month per user for unlimited access. The steady change in how online research…
Several times in the past I have pointed out the swarm of vendors and service providers who market to legal departments. They make up the cottage industry. In the past year or so, several more posts provide information about more denizens of the cottage. Most concern those who license, implement…
I thought it would be interesting to ask senior leaders in the cottage industry(thus, Cottage Industrialists) that serves legal departments – other than law firms – to describe the early history of their company, offer some metrics about it today, and give a specific example from a client about some…
This past Spring, BottomLine Technologies acquired Allegient Systems for about $48 million. The purchase significantly increased Bottomline’s position as a leader in the legal invoice automation market, particularly for insurance and other corporate claims functions. BottomLine, a publicly traded company, says on its website that it handles invoices for well…