With demand falling across the board and the world dancing on the precipice of recession, legal departments are facing tremendous pressure to cut costs. In conversations with general counsel the ALM Pacesetter Research team has held in recent months, many described receiving marching orders to reduce outside counsel spend by some arbitrary, often double-digit number.
Of course, legal departments tended to split their view of spend management between their internal department cost management, and their external spend – or their matter management. For their internal spend, the answer was resource management. Their approach to matter management was a bit more complicated, however.
