The clearest message to emerge from the ALB In-house Survey 2009 was that private practice lawyers still had plenty of scope to fine-tune their offerings. In the eyes of the region’s corporate counsel, many external lawyers need to do some work on a number of key issues of which billing methods, responsiveness, timeliness and the quality of the advice delivered were the most frequently raised.
However, this is not to say that things haven’t improved. In-house lawyers roundly noted that their relationships with external lawyers were now more flexible; they were willing to offer fee reductions, explore alternative billings arrangements and even hold back on work, but for many they still come up short when it comes to the basics: timeliness, quality and the more mundane things, such as drafting and clarity.
When ALB asked David Flavell, the Asia-Pacific GC for Danone Asia, what inhouse lawyers had to do to make it through the down time, he noted that the task in hand was a demanding one: they must remain close to their companies’ pulse and understand it and the market within which it operates intimately. Tasks which, of course, are mandatory in the job description of every in-house lawyer, but have a tendency to be waylaid by the day-to-day pressures of managing the entire legal function of a company, sometimes on a shoe-string budget and with minimal resources.
And this advice is indispensable to the region’s private practice lawyers who wish to continue to attract and retain instruction from in-house lawyers. If the events of the past six to 12 months have demonstrated anything it is that as collective gazes become fixed on the bottom line or balance sheet, some law firms are inevitably drawn away from the fundamentals. In the flight to cost cutting there is a very real danger that quality can be compromised.
If the events of the past six to 12 months have demonstrated anything it is that as collective gazes become fixed on the bottom line or balance sheet, some law firms are inevitably drawn away from the fundamentals.