“What irritates me most is when I get an e-mail from a law firm and about 60 other lawyers are cc’d in. You can bet the other 59 lawyers will charge for receiving, opening and reading the e-mail. When I get a bill like this, I send it back straight away”US-based investment bank regional general counsel
The extent to which these issues are wholly new is a different question. In-house lawyers across the region readily admit that increasing the amount of work handled in-house, slashing internal and external budgets, and squeezing more out of inhouse teams have been goals towards which they have been working for the best part of 20 years. It has only been the recent onset of the global economic crisis that has made attaining these goals more pressing. “Maximising efficiency, reducing costs and better serving broader company objectives are things that many in-house departments have been trying to do for the last 20 years,” Ingram says. “But now the economic climate has added urgency to this goal.”
But just how is this being achieved?
Slash and burn
As the results of the ALB In-house Survey 2009 indicate, when in-house teams look to minimise costs they do not only look to pare their teams or cut travel budgets; they also look long and hard at their largest liability – the amount of money spent on retaining outside counsel. “Companies across the region are looking to do this now more than ever,” Elliot says. “Some, I hear, are slashing the amount by ridiculous amounts and really concentrating their efforts on keeping the figure as close to zero as possible, but there are other things that will come out of this process.”
The “other things” to which Elliot refers involve analysing spending patterns for outside counsel, the frequency with which they are used and the typical matters on which their advice is sought. In addition, internal reviews are now under way at many of the region’s top companies which seek to “streamline” (read: centralise) the decision-making process. “We have just updated our guidelines for retaining in-house counsel. And we uncovered a number of things. Firstly, we have found that we use them on some matters for which we don’t need them and, secondly, that the decision to use them is sometimes a little all over the place. We have now put measures in place to reduce costs here and make sure we can monitor what stays inhouse and what goes out more closely,” says the general counsel at the USbased investment bank.
The same general counsel goes on to note that he had heard of similar companies undertaking the same task and coming to similar conclusions, but was quick to point out that the exercise need not only result in the cutting of external budgets or a decrease in the amount of work sent outside. “Such reviews are about setting up legal departments postglobal financial crisis and normalising relationships with external legal providers. The latter especially may have become a little too fluid to manage of late.”