That’s a question I hear surprisingly frequently from individual partners when I work with a firm that is trying to embrace legal project management (LPM) as a discipline.  For better or worse, most firms seem to like to start the process by rolling out a fairly generic version of training on LPM methodologies across their entire partnership.  Such training tends to describe, in an ideal world, how legal matters can be efficiently managed.  But few of us live or practice in an ideal world, and even the best-laid plans lose some of their sharpness when put into practice.  As the oft-quoted line goes “no plan survives contact with the enemy.”

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I hope you found the title of this post a bit jarring; yet it doesn’t seem all that strange a question to ask, if you look at what many law firms and their clients are saying, if not to each other, then amongst themselves, when they discuss their fee arrangements.  Implicit in many comments about the results of a fee negotiation are assumptions about what “success” may mean for one side or the other, and what it takes to achieve it.  Indeed, the WSJ Law Blog headline that followed the release of the ACC 2011 Census Report put in very much those terms, “In-House Lawyers Gaining the Upper Hand”.

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Some of you may have noticed that the latest edition of the Real Rate Report is out from Tymetrix and the Corporate Executive Board, and it contains some tantalizing figures.  Let’s start with the headline, that rates are rising.  Not rising quite as fast in the recovery as in the boom and not rising equally across all regions and all sizes of firms, but rising overall.  According to Tymetrix, their “2012 report saw lawyer rates continue to rise through the recession and recovery.  After increasing 8.2 percent from 2007-2008, rates moderated briefly in 2008-2009 (just 2.3 percent increase), but resumed growing at a rate of more than 4 percent per year since 2009.”  What does that tell us?

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I recently had the privilege to moderate a panel discussion with some of the most thoughtful practitioners in the area of legal sourcing, and I just realized I hadn’t even mentioned it here.  At the Sourcing Interests Group (SIG) Global Sourcing Summit, on March 28th, we enjoyed a lively discussion featuring Jill Zunshine, VP for Americas Region in Global Procurement at HP; Ojas Sampat, Director of Strategic Sourcing at Cigna; and Ganesh Natarajan, CEO of Mindcrest. 

I won’t try to reproduce the entire hour-long discussion here, but I will share the slides for those of you who are interested, as well as highlight a couple of interesting points.  In the slides, you will see a couple of observations about the market and its dynamics, and the specific questions we drilled into.  The entire discussion was structured around the “sourcing lifecycle” from understanding why companies might outsource legal processes, to exploring what is happening in the supply market, to developing and executing on a strategy, to then managing relationships and optimizing performance.  Sourcing professionals in the audience vastly outnumbered the lawyers, as might be expected given the forum, and interestingly more than a third had actual experience sourcing legal process outsourcing (LPO) services, and another third were starting to look at the category.

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