Around the water cooler
February 25, 2008
Calling all questions
Do you ever wish that you could get a general counsel or in-house lawyer in a conference room so that you could pump them for information about improving your relationship with them — well you can. Sort of.
We are having a roundtable discussion with a group of general counsel attorneys and we want to know what we should ask them. What general questions do you have for them? What topics are you curious about? If you’ve got some ideas please email me, Olivia Clarke, at oclarke@lbpc.com.
We want your ideas and we want to provide you with the most useful and interesting story possible.
According to recent surveys, corporate counsel are vein bursting mad over rising legal costs and in particular litigation costs. Yet, when confronted with litigation matters, particularly high stakes matters, corporate counsel usually hire large “big name” firms whose business model is built upon deriving a substantial amount of their profits from litigation - a model that is necessarily driven by staffing cases with more rather than less lawyers.
Yet, the fact is that anyone who knows how to litigate effectively and efficiently (I have been a complex litigator for 29 years), knows that the best litigation teams are small (most cases, even the largest and most complex, should have no more than five lawyers). Less is more when it comes to litigation.
Moreover, name recognition (the name of the firm or its size) has little to no impact before most judges these days and most certainly has no impact with jurors. It is the individual lawyers involved in the case and not the name of the firm that count.
So, the question is why do corporate counsel continue to repeat the same mistake? There are so many highly qualified litigation boutiques around who are equals to if not superior to their large firm counterparts and, most important, they are very competitive on price - primarily because they know how to litigate leanly and meanly.
Wouldn’t it be in corporate counsel’s best economic interests to hire such firms and in turn create a market for the continued growth of more such boutiques? Or is it just safer to hire a large firm because corporate counsel can’t be second guessed if something goes wrong? If so, doesn’t this mentality perpetuate the same cycle?