This is a really important article. @AdvanceLaw study shows law firm panels deliver few if any benefits to law departments. law.com/americanlawyer… Non-panel firms appear to perform slightly better, in fact.
Panel firms tend to get complacent about service shortly after their selection. And since they already need to be big to handle a broad range of corporate work, they suffer from the usual inefficiencies of large firms.
Most disconcerting is that there's actually a slight *negative* correlation between the concentration of client spend with a law firm and the firm's performance on a range of client criteria. "We gave you all this work. and this is the thanks we get?"
The AdvanceLaw people theorize that the problem isn't panels per se, but "poor choices and execution when creating and managing panels." That's highly plausible, and their next article will examine how to address it. But I wonder if the problem goes deeper than that.
Maybe the problem with panels is that they're too homogenous. It's fine to reduce your law firm complement from 80 to 8 or whatever. But if all 8 are huge law firms indistinguishable from each other, you're just concentrating all your outside counsel headaches in a smaller space.
Maybe panels should be more diverse. Instead of 8 BigLaw firms, pick 2 or 3 firms limited to big-ticket items only, 2 or 3 boutiques/small regionals for specialty items, 1 or 2 managed legal services companies to handle low/mid-level work, etc.
This would require law departments to develop a governing theory and build an architecture for the intense, active management of outside legal services. That's an immense amount of hard work, and it doesn't seem like many law departments are willing and/or able to do that.
What lawyers in law firms and law depts seem to share is difficulty grasping how incredibly complex and arduous is the management of legal services. It takes a huge amount of attention, time and money. We need to get serious about this. Law firm panels are insufficiently serious.
@threadreaderapp Unroll please
