GCs Vent Their Frustrations About Outside Counsel

GCs Vent Their Frustrations About Outside Counsel
Petra Pasternak
The Recorder
May 23, 2006

Richard Gray is not fond of surprises.

Not the kind that arrive when Gray, the Claria Corp. general counsel, is on a conference call with the company's entire board of directors and his outside counsel brings up a new legal requirement or a potential problem for the first time.

Caught off guard, Gray said he once had to scramble to field the initial questions and save what could have turned into a precarious situation by telling his bosses he would look into the matter and present it at a later time. "That's not a warm and fuzzy feeling," he said. "It worked out fine, but I should never be put in that position."

Surprises are just one thing outside counsel are well-advised to keep out of their repertoire if they want to earn a GC's love.

According to a study published this year by BTI Consulting Group Inc., a Massachusetts-based legal consulting firm, only about 30 percent of GCs nationwide were satisfied with their primary law firms in 2005, down from 43.5 percent the previous year. The picture was a little rosier in Northern California, but satisfaction still dropped from 60.2 percent in 2004 to 56.8 percent last year.

BTI attributes the decline to three main factors: law firms' failure to keep up with a GC's changing needs, an inability to articulate the value of services delivered and poor communication. The survey included more than 1,000 interviews from corporate counsel at large and Fortune 1000 companies.

Fed up GCs, squeezed by budget constraints and pressure from boards of directors, are reacting to shoddy work by outside counsel by demoting and replacing their primary law firms and spreading the wealth among a larger network of secondary firms.

Nothing is more dangerous than a client who's left to assume a lawyer is playing golf or, worse, napping on their dime. So it's always a good idea to regularly gauge client satisfaction and keep aware of the following pet peeves that have peppered GCs' legal careers for decades: