In 2009, the recession was forcing corporate law departments to cut their budgets wherever they could, and outside legal spending was the biggest target. But some in-house lawyers said they weren’t just trying to get steeper discounts from their law firms — they wanted a fundamental change in the way they were charged.
They were fed up with invoices based on the billable hour and were pushing firms to switch to alternative fee arrangements. Surprisingly, outside lawyers said that they were OK with this, and were doing what they could to meet the demand.
