Latest in Micromanagement: Clients Evaluate law firms on Flextime
You can tell it's a buyer's market for legal services, because corporations are evaluating law firms on strictly internal practices, such as offering flextime. Next thing you know, corporations will be specifying what lawyers should eat for lunch and what colors to wear to work.
I can understand corporations wanting early case assessments, budgets and alternative fees. That makes good business sense. But little 7 to 10-person in-house departments are starting to specify how 500-lawyer firms conduct their internal affairs.
The micromanagement began when corporations demanded a minimum years of experience for associates working on their files. They pushed their luck by insisting that law firms use their own special billing software. They galled law firms by hiring nitpicking auditors to go over every .2 of an hour billed on a file. And the bolder they become, doesn't it seem the slower they pay their bills?
When it comes to dictating alternative working arrangements or hours, they've gone too far. Here's what the National Law Journal reported:
Retail giant Wal-Mart Stores Inc. plans to add evaluation of a law firm's flextime policies to its list of criteria for evaluating outside firms, according to a panelist at the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC)'s annual meeting in Boston.
Joseph West, associate general counsel at Wal-Mart, said the company plans to add flextime policies to its current list of law firm measures: cost-effectiveness, performance and diversity.
West was one of eight panelists on an Oct. 20, 2009, panel covering how in-house counsel departments can get more value from the law firms they work with: "50 Ways and Counting to Drive Value into Law Firm Relationships."
West said Wal-Mart plans to require firms to have flextime policies, which are generally defined as alternative working arrangements or hours, and require that "the policies themselves be flexible." Law firms and legal departments have typically implemented flextime policies to attract and retain working mothers.
"We've found that even those firms that have flextime policies, they haven't communicated to attorneys in the firm that it's OK to use them without fear or shame," West said.
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