During a recent conversation, the Director of Litigation of a Fortune 100 company indicated that he had a fixed fee contract with his law firm for litigation support. How great is that idea? It sure did not work for Walmart - well nobody gets sued like Walmart.
Nonetheless, taking cue from the Wired GCs recent post...
"If we are only talking about “overseeing” litigation (whatever that really means), perhaps I can find a lawyer who will do this on a fixed fee. We assume that it is not a lawyer at the primary litigation firm. It should come as no surprise that most litigation is billed the good ol’ fashioned way–by the hour. I don’t know how many lawyers would want to “oversee” litigation for a fixed price when the underlying case is being billed by the hour. Part of me thinks that if you need someone to oversee a case, you may have the wrong person handling it in the first place."
There is bound to be some level of compromise somewhere. Let’s discuss some hypothetical scenarios.
Scenario 1: The workload substantially increases a particular month (Sarbanes Oxley has become omnipotent). How does the law firm handle the fluctuation? Scramble to find temporary lawyers or keep highly paid attorneys on its staff on call?
Scenario 2: The workload is minimal for a few months - free money for the law firm but the GC is under pressure to get the bang for his buck
Corybantic management on both sides.
Some amount of legal work needs to be commoditized for the lack of any other term. You need to slice up the work and compartmentalize wherever possible. However small that chunk is - only then can you even start budgeting something like that efficiently.
A large portion of legal work however will continue to be based on the billable hour but why not build efficiencies where you can?
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1 comment:
That was very "enlightening". Queries which have remained unanswered until now have been addressed very cleverly in this post. A masterpiece i should say. Thank you so much.
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