At our most recent webinar, we wanted to find out what our loyal Blawg visitors do to save money on outside lawyers. One of the questions we asked our 1,500+ attendees was:

Does your company require your law firms to set and meet a budget for each lawsuit?

The results? Exactly one-third (33%) responded “no.”

Yikes. Think of all the budgeting you do at work and at home. Shouldn’t lawyers be held to a similar standard?

While litigation costs can be difficult to forecast, requiring budgets can be a useful tool to help (1) set expectations, (2) foster communication throughout the suit, (3) hold lawyers accountable and, ultimately, (4) reduce costs.

When I was at a law firm, some of my more sophisticated clients required budgets. While forcing myself to estimate costs beforehand and be held accountable was somewhat painful, overall I really believe that the process helped me provide better service and build better relationships with my clients.

Click here for our free suite of tools designed to help you manage your outside lawyers. In addition to budgets and rigorous (but fair) billing guidelines, you’ll find scorecards and a handy RFP process.

Hope you find them helpful.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 15th, 2009 at 6:25 am and is filed under Legal Fees, Litigation, Poll Results, Trends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.