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Saturday, July 07, 2007
Law - "Executives Rank Law Firms on Service and 'Arrogance'"
Zusha Elinson and Douglas Malan write today in The Connecticut Law Tribune:
Eric I. Cohen was disturbed by the numbers he was seeing. The senior vice president and general counsel for the Terex Corp., based in Westport, Conn., recalls facing the prospect of a "large bill" from outside counsel who were handling a matter requiring the production of scores of written documents.Unhappy with the quoted price, Cohen floated the idea of outsourcing part of the job to lawyers in India. That, he said, would reduce legal fees from a couple hundred dollars an hour for lawyers in the United States to less than $30 per hour. The outside counsel firm, which Cohen would not name, responded by dropping its hourly charge to the mid-$30 range.
Terex Corp., which makes backhoes, mining trucks and other large pieces of construction equipment, is hardly the only big company to have issues with its outside counsel. More and more, American corporations are dissatisfied with their law firms. Citing spiraling costs, poor communication, lack of urgency on important matters and general arrogance, just 32 percent of executives responding to a recent survey said they liked their outside counsel enough to recommend the firm to someone else.
"Overall client satisfaction is very low," said Michael Rynowecer, president of The BTI Consulting Group Inc., which is based in Boston and released its sixth annual survey in 2006. "By focusing on who does well, you learn what can be done to improve that." * * *
When corporations say they are dissatisfied with their outside counsel, it usually means "they think they're getting taken for a ride with the costs," said Cohen, who negotiated discounts with the law firms his company uses by asking them to use lower-cost lawyers in the Midwest for document preparation rather than higher-priced New York City-based associates. [emphasis added by ILB]
BTI also compiled a list of the "most arrogant" law firms. Arrogance was defined, in part, by high fees, a refusal to take on work and poor experience in certain matters.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on July 7, 2007 10:00 AM
Posted to General Law Related