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Law Department Management |
Cut-Rate Counsel?
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Firms Offer Lower-Cost Alternatives to Top-Rate Attorneys
By Ursula Furi-Perry
It's no secret that many corporate counsel are fed up with high outside counsel costs. Business pressures to cut legal costs, coupled with outrage over rising associate salaries, have led some corporate counsel to cry foul and some firms to offer lower-cost alternatives to top-rate attorneys.
The latest round of associate salary increases to $160,000 was the "final straw," believes Deborah House, vice president and deputy general counsel of the Association of Corporate Counsel in Washington, D.C. "In-house counsel are looking very carefully at their billable hours, given that the economy is hitting us," she says. In fact, House says that the ACC has received some inquiries from law firms seeking resources to help them budget better with their corporate clients.
Firms are also trying to come up with ideas of their own to retain their corporate clients.
Some law firms are hiring non-lawyers to do corporate work that they feel doesn't necessarily need to be done by attorneys. In an article in the National Law Journal, an ALM publication, Sheri Qualters reports on Faber Daeufer & Rosenberg, a firm in Waltham, Mass., that uses non-lawyer "contract specialists" to perform template contract work.
The firm bills them out at lower rates than attorneys. Contract specialists' rates were reported between $220 and $280 per hour, compared with $290 to $510 per hour for the firm's attorneys. According to the article, the small boutique law firm has found success in its innovation, landing more than 200 life-sciences companies as clients since the firm's inception in 2003.
McDermott Will & Emery, an international law firm of more than 1,000 attorneys, recently announced that it was creating a permanent class of staff associates: lawyers who will be paid less, work less (though st...
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