Amidst the welter of 2013 reforms, the legitimisation of contingency fees stood out. For centuries we had been told that a lawyer could not run litigation in return for a cut of the damages recovered. This would invite corruption, as the representative would have an overwhelming...

Everyone is entitled to their opinion; indeed part of the Validatum® philosophy is to encourage and embrace diverse perspectives in our online forums and other media. However, sometimes we see something so egregiously wrong and potentially harmful...

I still recall the (somewhat tongue in cheek) advice I had from the senior partner of the firm I was with in the early 80s. “When you send out a big bill, I mean an eye-watering bill, send it out on a Friday and don’t come to work on Monday – let someone else take the call from the client”. Cynical? Yes, but...

The latest research from Acritas’ Sharplegal, an annual global legal market survey of over 2,000 General Counsel, reveals how differently male and female buyers approach the purchase of legal services. As the number of women attaining senior in-house positions continues to rise, the findings raise...

Ask any private-practice lawyer and they will tell you that clients frequently aggravate their costs through their own conduct. The result is costs that are higher than they could have been, a disgruntled client and almost inevitably, some sort of write-off...

More and more law firms have acquired additional pricing and price negotiation skills or brought in external pricing professionals to participate in the negotiation process. They have also become considerably more rigorous about whether to throw their hat in the ring...

We hope that the following synopsis of some of the most popular and widely republished of our 2014 law firm pricing blogs will provide you with some inspiration and guidance as you perhaps ponder what your firms' approach to pricing will be over the next 12 months....

Pam Waldow is a Partner and GC at legal consultancy, Edge International in the US. Pam writes great articles, the latest of which I thoroughly commend – Straight From The Horse’s Mouth: GCs Say What They Want From Outside Firms. I agree with all of it except one of the comments made by...

Health Warning: This is a good-natured satirical critique of legal procurement professionals. If you are thin skinned, don’t read it (so now of course you will). Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. Heed the wisdom of the ages...

When we work intensively with firms on pricing, a common grizzle is the firms’ frustration with what they characterise as the lack of sophistication with which the ‘procurement’ exercise is run. Non-lawyers often approach the procurement of even sophisticated...

The pricing function in many law firms is something of an orphan. No-one knows who it belongs to so it ends up belonging to no-one. Individual department heads and fee earners make decisions on the fly with little regard to the firms’ pricing policies...

The first article in this two-part series looked at some of the underlying structural issues impacting the approach taken by international law firms to the setting of prices in diverse geographical locations. It also identified the increasing propensity...