And in other continuing themes – technology-enabled lawyering and checklists – this company is among those “harnessing the power of computing to create contract checklists for entire agreements and individual clauses.”

In-house leaders already know that even a medium-size patent portfolio is expensive to maintain, and to defend or assert in litigation. $5 million per case for patent litigation sounds about right.

“Tesco” news – consumer-oriented legal services company plans for significant growth. “Putting the numbers of trainees on a par with magic circle firms, the move will come as part of the Co-op’s plans to create 3,000 jobs in the legal sector as it aims to revolutionise how legal services are delivered on the high street.” These kinds of business models aren’t directly relevant to the corporate world – but they are are good examples of ongoing innovation in service delivery models….

….including this example more relevant to in-house teams: an “on-demand” model from the Magic Circle: “The magic circle firm has launched a programme, entitled ‘Freshfields Continuum’, under which former partners and associates can work for the firm on flexible contracts when it experiences high demand.”

Panel news for the week – here and here – some panel contraction, some expansion, but one can expect a drive for cost savings sought across the board. As one survey of in-house leaders recently indicated, litigation is “public enemy number one.”

And in other news from the U.K. – law firm to spin off interim lawyer service. “It began with a pilot of eight lawyers and has since grown to over 100, with revenue exceeding £7m.”

LegalZoom files for IPO. Commoditized, IT-enabled offerings in other sectors of the legal services business can’t be too far away – as predicted in Richard Susskind’s The End of Lawyers?

I like checklists that focus on outcomes, costs and value – for example, this is an interesting one on internal investigations.

Elsewhere in checklists – this one on evaluating legal process outsourcing (from a LPO vendor) is nicely done (free reg. req’d). I think the suggestion to “select the right pilot” is spot-on.

And finally, how much did the plaintiff (a lawyer) in this breakfast buffet lawsuit get hit with for the defendant’s legal costs? I was surprised it was only $440 – perhaps that was just the court costs?

For those interested in LPM, here’s a good summary of project management fundamentals (pages 1-15; the balance is VCU-specific). Thank you, Attorney at Work, for the link.

Citi publishes BigLaw revenue and expense data. When the bulk of your work is hourly, you pay a lot of attention to billable hours metrics – “To keep their lawyers busy, firms are taking work at lower billing rates than they normally would, or continued to extend discounts that undercut profitability.”

The apps are coming, the apps are coming – e-discovery vendor to launch app store “to let customers integrate other company’s products into” its software. Will apps be a common BigLaw offering someday? Or will legal tech vendors corner that market?

“Tesco” news from the U.K. – trucking company to connect businesses to barristers without having to go through a solicitor – saying “it can cut the cost of barristers’ services by charging clients a fixed fee and using paralegals instead of solicitors to help prepare a case.”

GC’s doing business in India, or planning to do so, will want to keep an eye on the pitched battle over “fly in fly out” lawyering.

Every BigLaw firm seeks out “huge” litigation matters on which they can deploy very large teams of associates and partners at all levels of seniority. However, with law department leaders implementing ever more sophisticated engagement terms in order to pay for value received rather than simply for effort expended, Dewey is an excellent example of how a law firm’s senior management must factor these arrangements into their business model. That said, the type of arrangement cited in the WSJ article doesn’t seem like it would be especially difficult to deal with – hopefully the Dewey litigators’ new firm is better prepared to manage such a fee structure – or to have a collaborative conversation with the GC who retained them about other options that will meet the objectives of both the client and the law firm.

Whether it’s Six Sigma or other programs to redesign how legal services are delivered, are lawyers fundamentally resistant to change? GC’s, are you pushing change by your outside firms, watching it unfold, or resisting it?

Cost-cutting tips for law departments, including workflow analyses, panel rationalization , and managing e-discovery costs – plus updates on LPO and litigation finance.

Six factors for choosing counsel for internal investigations – I was glad to see that cost made the list.

Chinese firms continue to ramp up their efforts to globalize through mergers, expansion, and enhancing their management infrastructures – a trend worth watching.

If this new book on digital forensics is as good as the review suggests, then it may be worthwhile airplane reading for in-house leaders who want to improve their ability to manage and budget for major e-discovery projects.

You will have a more varied set of options for Singapore counsel now that a number of BigLaw firms are expected to apply to practice local law in Singapore next year.

Value-based relationships don’t mean cheap or free. Pricing based on worth to the client, not time spent, and driving down the cost of the work through efficiency – GC’s, are your law firms stepping up to the plate on these issues?

General counsels paying their bills for litigation matters won’t be surprised that one company attributed its record revenue to e-discovery.

I wonder how much both sides spent in legal fees in this dispute over line spacing.

How much does it cost when the SEC comes calling? Up to $10 million – and it must be nice to be able to run a tab. (sub. req’d)

Continuing with our “checklists” theme from prior blog posts – Paul Lippe has a checklist for assessing whether a law department or firm is “old normal” or “new normal.”

FTC retains outside counsel for Google antitrust probe. I’ll be keeping an eye out for news on the fee arrangements.

DOJ to pay $2.2 million in legal fees and costs after nine years of litigation over a property worth about a third of that sum. Among other criticisms that could be made of this kind of risk management, it sure seems like a project that got out of hand somewhere along the way – perhaps even the Feds could use some LPM training.

U.K. panel news – taking to the skies with BA. “BA’s tender document, which law firms submitted last autumn, is understood to have asked firms to provide details of alternative fee arrangements as well as secondees and in-house training they could provide to the airline.”

Three state bar associations give their blessing to daily deals (think GroupOn) for lawyers. Basically they viewed them as advertising rather than impermissible fee-splitting.

If you’re looking for some basic project management tools as an entry point for upgrading your LPM capabilities, check out this article.

Outside counsel, it’s time to start paying attention to email encryption – your clients will likely be requiring it in the not too far distant future.

A flat fee for a Supreme Court argument – and an expense cap as well.

For the latest U.K. panel news, click here and here.

The ABA announces it will not be changing its policy on non-lawyer ownership of law firms. In its statement, the 20/20 Commission said “that the case had not been made for proceeding even with a form of nonlawyer ownership that is more limited than the D.C. model.”

An “insider” view of Rambus’ patent litigation strategy – at a cost of at least $300 million in legal fees.

Can e-discovery costs be assessed against the losing party? Although some courts have found otherwise, the Third Circuit determined that the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure are “to be interpreted narrowly so as not to include e-discovery costs…”

A law professor’s essay on three generations of lawyers. In-house leaders, do you agree that we are “now in transition from the specialist to the project manager era”?

Gawande is a surgeon, and his examples are primarily from medicine, aviation and construction. I believe that his approach has equal validity for lawyers doing high-end, bespoke, work for corporate clients. He sees checklists as a way for teams that come together to complete very complex, deadline-driven, critical tasks – whether an emergency surgery, or, I suggest, a demanding M&A deal or bet-the-company litigation matter – to greatly improve their collaboration, and their efficiency and effectiveness, by using checklists as a tool to jumpstart and improve their communication, both at the beginning of a project as well as along the way. He suggests using checklists as a way to make “reliable management of complexity a routine.” It is a routine that “requires balancing a number of virtues: freedom and discipline, craft and protocol, specialized ability and group collaboration.”

For those who like to see data, Gawande presents some very interesting statistics to back up his assertion that “checklists supply a set of checks to ensure the stupid but critical stuff is not overlooked, and they supply another set of checks to ensure people talk and coordinate and accept responsibility while nonetheless being left the power to manage the nuances and unpredictabilities they best know how.” Hmmm, nuances, unpredictability – doesn’t that sound a lot like what the BigLaw partners with the highest billing rates say they are expert at dealing with? So if checklists can help make the routine work more efficient – less re-work by junior associates, anyone? – isn’t that good for lawyers and their clients? And it still leaves the experts the latitude to do what they do best: “There must always be room for judgment, but judgment aided – and even enhanced – by procedure.”

What does a good checklist look like? I’m pretty sure it’s not one of the 20-page “closing checklists” that I drafted and tracked as a junior deal lawyer. Gawande offers plenty of practical examples of good – and not so good – checklists. He even addresses the difference between “DO-CONFIRM” and “READ-DO” checklists.

If you’re an in-house leader wanting to have an “outside the box” conversation with your outside counsel regarding legal project management or collaboration (and how improvements in those areas can help you get more value out of your legal spend – and win them more business!), consider bringing your favorite BigLaw partner a copy of this book as a conversation starter.

Class actions in 2011 focused on M&A and internal controls. GC’s will continue to have to bake those costs into their deal budgets – and continue to develop better ways to manage even these hard-to-control elements of big deals.

Use of AFA’s continues to grow, reports The Wall Street Journal. Based on a Citibank survey, the article reports that at “large law firms, the percentage of revenue from alternative-billing arrangements is expected to hit 13.4% this year, nearly double what it was in 2008…” That number sounds about right, based on what I hear from GC’s – so there’s still lots of room for innovation and growth in AFA’s.

Legal fees really are the “elephant in the room” in this circus lawsuit.

Iowa lawyer suspended for 30 days for charging nonrefundable retainer that court found to be “unreasonable” relative to the work done. Not exactly striking a blow for AFA’s, eh? But presumably courts would find corporate clients better able to negotiate a market rate for fixed fees and other alternatives to the billable hour.

Paul Lippe has a good 10-point checklist for managing legal spending, including defining objectives, processes and incentives – and perhaps most importantly, collaboration.

Are alternative business structures (ABS) in the U.K. “off to a quiet start“? On this side of the Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal has a good summary on the current state of the debate amongst the ABA, state bar associations, academia, trade groups and others regarding non-lawyer ownership and multidisciplinary practices.

AFA’s require open communication – no surprise there – as well as new ways of thinking about BigLaw partner compensation.

More evidence that it’s really, really expensive to be bankrupt: the lawyers’ tab for American Airlines’ parent company starts at $21 million, and counting.

Law firm mergers “gallop” along – law department leaders, do these events affect your sourcing strategies (outside of garden variety conflicts issues)?

Conflicts checking – another function that BigLaw can source in lower-cost geographies.

GC’s, do you assess your law firms’ IT security capabilities on an ongoing basis? Are “they prepared to defend sensitive client data from a host of extremely sophisticated and stealthy rootkit attacks launched by hackers, cybercriminals, rogue hacktivists and even foreign governments?”