There has been quite a lot of comment recently about external legal fees: from the future of the hourly rate, in-house legal expectations and their views on the bills they receive to potential fee rises in a strong marketplace.
All good comment and all very relevant. Talking to some in-house lawyers, I think that there is a growing concern of how to cope with the pressure to ‘do more with less’ i.e. do more work in-house against the backdrop of greater cost control. This begs the question: how does the pressure to do more with less reconcile with the continuing upwards trend in charging and headline rates?
