Legal officers can control costs

Staff and Wire Reports//November 5, 2014//

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The 15th annual Altman Weil Chief Legal Officer Survey finds corporate law departments are wielding their buying power to drive down expenditures on outside counsel, and innovating from within to further control costs.

The two methods chief legal officers used most frequently to control costs in the last 12 months are direct price reductions from outside counsel and alternative or fixed fee arrangements, according to the survey.

The most common price reduction — received by half of all law departments surveyed — is between 6 and 10 percent. The number of departments receiving average discounts of more than 10 percent is 36 percent this year, a jump from 28 percent in the 2013 survey.

Along with targeting outside counsel pricing, CLOs also manage costs by managing the distribution of work to law firms. Of all cost control efforts undertaken in the last 12 months, CLOs report that shifting work in-house is the one that yielded the greatest cost reduction.

The full survey is available to download at www.altmanweil.com/CLO2014.