Hourly Billing Rate Still Prevails For Legal Work Referred By Corporations To Outside Counsel.
The Association of Corporate Counsel and recruiting firm Major, Lindsey & Africa partnered up to release a 2019 Global Legal Department Benchmarking Report, which can be obtained freely through a Website search. It involved interview responses from 508 corporate law departments, operating across 30 countries and 71 industries. Here is a summary of the results which interested us:
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- Two-thirds of corporate departments hire outside firms using standard hourly or discounted hourly rates, followed by nearly 45% that use flat fees, and 31% that use “capped fees.”
- Most in-house legal teams accounted for a small percent of their company’s total staff, about 0.3% of employees.
- Contract management internal work stayed in-house, at 97%. This work generally was performed by lawyers, versus paralegals or other legal assistants, in more than 80% of the surveyed departments.
- The median legal department used 10 firms, listing three as “significant” firm relationships.