Legal department consultant Rees Morrison, president of Rees Morrison Associates, says the practice of hiring more in-house lawyers to take away work from outside counsel is still extremely rare. However, he is seeing it happen in the e-discovery area. For many companies, it’s one of their largest expenditures, so focusing on savings there can really pay off.
“Law departments realized it’s costly to hire vendors, and even more costly to hire law firms, to capture data forensically, put it in databases, and sort through your document review, your privilege review,” Morrison says. “If you hire one or two of your own people, it makes an economic difference in the costly e-discovery process.”
