The dirty secret about cost control: lawyers on the line don’t really want to do it

The thought has troubled me for some time that in-house lawyers who manage outside law firms have very little reason to control costs (See my post of May 26, 2006 on rubber hitting the road.). All the wonderful systems and processes and external incentive systems pale in comparison to what a motivated and dedicated in-house counsel can do. But they don’t.

So I wrote an article, published in Legal Times, Sept. 2007, that offers some suggestions for how to involve individual lawyers in a campaign to spend law department dollars more wisely. Here is the article.