The Fordham Law Review recently published an article on the growing shift within legal departments and courts to unbundle cases into discrete tasks to better control legal spending. Sophisticated corporate leaders in this area set expectations in-house and with outside counsel on budget, efficiency and accountability. They also leverage process, technology and data to make informed decisions on tasks, strategy and spending. As the Fordham study observed, clients are “applying procurement principles to source legal projects to the most cost-efficient providers.”
With an eye toward this trend, there are five steps corporate counsel and their outside counsel can take now to disaggregate cases into tasks, determine their value, and ensure the value is reasonable, justified and expected:
