What Matters Most? Expertise (and COST)

An excerpt from an article in the Legal Times reveals that among the three factors which inhouse counsel for corporations are looking for from their outside counsel is: COST. We provide a very viable option to corporate counsel and it is a matter of time before they realise the cost benefit of using legal outsourcing.
THE COST FACTOR Prevalent throughout the survey responses was a concern about costs. Litigation expenses are top-of-mind for a large number of corporate counsel. For almost 20 percent of the respondents, the overall costs of litigation, rather than any specific category of lawsuit, was the leading concern. Controlling unpredictable litigation expenses poses a challenge for in-house lawyers, so much so that 43 percent don't operate under a set litigation budget. The responses from the 146 counsel who were able to report the amount of their companies' litigation budgets, however, demonstrate the significant price of litigation. Of the average legal budget of $20.1 million, more than a third -- $8 million -- is directed toward litigation-related expenses. About a quarter of the companies surveyed said that litigation spending accounts for 21 percent to 50 percent of their legal budget. An additional 12 percent reported that litigation expenses accounted for more than 50 percent of their total legal budget. How does all of this translate into real dollars? Of the $1 billion-plus companies with legal budgets that demand more than 5 percent of gross revenues (8 percent of the category respondents), 32 percent spend anywhere from a quarter to one-half of their legal budget on litigation. That's between $12.5 million and $25 million annually. For an additional 16 percent of the largest companies, their litigation budget is more than half of their legal budget, which is the equivalent of $10 million to $25 million a year. The amount of money corporate America spends annually on lawsuits goes a long way toward explaining the desire of in-house counsel to reduce expenditures. For a third of the respondents, the message they most wanted to deliver to outside counsel was "control costs." That took precedence over results-oriented messages like "win cases" or "get results." Many corporate counsel, however, are satisfied with the jobs that their outside law firms are doing, with nearly a quarter of those surveyed responding with some variation of "keep up the good work."