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PODCAST: How to Control Outside Counsel Spending (8MB - Right Click & "Save Target As...")
Ask the No Nonsense Lawyer interview featuring Rob Thomas of Serengeti Law

             TABLE OF CONTENTS
1:46      Rob Thomas introduced
2:03      Project Management – What goes into a project management plan?
4:42      Retention Agreements - Aren’t retention agreements with your law firm enough?
6:00      Should the rules of engagement for litigation be different than for business transactions?
7:30      Are “outside counsel policies” the same as “retention agreements”?
8:13      What topics should be covered in retention agreements?
14:15     Recap of key topics for retention agreements
15:04     Are there special considerations for international engagements?
17:03    How do you neutralize a law firm’s reluctance to being managed?
21:28    Is requiring a budget unreasonable?
23:30    What are the common pitfalls when law departments ask for budgets?
27:21    Status Reports – What are your recommendations for frequency?
32:32    Recaps: The value of reviewing a project with your long time counsel
35:39:   Reusing and sharing work product
37:40    Data Analysis – How do you identify non-firm vendors?
41:00    Using recap to reveal AFA opportunities
44:58    Alternative Fee Arrangements (AFA): Using recaps to assess the viability of a fixed or “capped” fee
47:40    How do you assess a firm’s track record to see if they are right for your project?
49:29    Spotlight – FMC Technologies – Using recaps to successfully move forward with your firms
55:36    What are the biggest mistakes law departments make when trying to manage outside counsel spending?
59:16    Rob Thomas providing contact information for Matrix of Retention Terms
Copyright Business M.O., LLC. All rights reserved. Reproduced with permission.

WEBCAST 1: Electronic Invoicing - It's not just for large law departments
Featuring American Express, Sierra Health, and Resun Corporation

How big do you have to be to be a potential candidate for electronic billing?
Could you elaborate on the point that a smaller departments may need an e-billing system more larger ones?
Can you speak to the process for companies to follow in selecting an e-billing system?
How does Electronic Billing integrate with the accounting systems of your company?
What types of potential savings are companies achieving when comparing savings with the cost of the system?

WEBCAST 2: Electronic Billing For Small Law Departments
Featuring NStar Electric & Gas and Modspace

Did Modspace receive the savings that you were hoping for both in time and in spending?
Talk about the resources, people, time, and major things that need to happen to get the system up and going.
What has been your experience with Serengeti and internal audits?
What kinds of pushback did you have from firms? How did you deal with it?
Any internal pushback?

Webcast 3: Managing Outside Counsel - Getting off on the right foot & staying in step
Featuring American Express, American Express Travel Related Services, and FMC Technologies

How do you track progress against a plan, and spending against the budget as you're moving through the project?
What types of reports do you run to track spending against budget or status results?
How do you handle unforeseen circumstances, changes in a matter once you have a budget or a plan in place?
What is the relationship between budgets from outside counsel and your law department budget?

Webcast 4: Tracking Outside counsel performance
Featuring American Express Travel Related Services and FMC Technologies

I would like each company to talk briefly about how they collect the results they capture.
What types of information are you looking for at the end of a legal project to assess the results and lessons learned?
Do any of you have any performance-based compensation?

TRANSCRIPT

Webcast 1: Electronic Invoicing - It's Not Just for Large Law Departments
The Association of Corporate Counsel Web Seminar

DESCRIPTION

Should your law department process legal bills online? From the world’s largest legal departments to those with a single attorney, companies are using electronic billing to save time and control their spending.

PARTICIPANTS

Rob Thomas: Vice President, Strategic Development, Serengeti Law (Moderator)
Lynn Molfetta: Global Legal Administrator, American Express (Large law department)
Geneva Gilbertson: Law Department Administrator, Sierra Health (Medium law department)
James Sheets: VP and Corporate Counsel, Resun Corporation (Small law department)

RESOURCES

HIGHLIGHTS

Rob Thomas: How big do you have to be to make you a potential candidate for electronic billing?

James Sheets: Return on the investment has been incredible. One important component in saving outside counsel fees has been electronic billing. It’s made me much more efficient. It’s increased the discipline on the part of the law firms. It’s helped track spending to the budget, which from my perspective, when reporting to the President of the company as to how we’re doing in outside counsel spending, is incredibly important.

Rob Thomas: Could you elaborate on the point that a smaller departments may need an e-billing system more larger ones?

James Sheets: One reason why electronic billing may actually benefit the smaller department is that it doesn’t have the resources as opposed to a 15 or 20 attorney law department. I don’t have the manpower or the resources available to go through the bills each month, to audit them and yet to manage and meet my job responsibilities. Having an electronic billing system almost adds a head count to the legal department and removes time consuming responsibilities from my shoulders, and instead, automates it.

Lynn Molfetta: When you are on an electronic billing system, you get the bill immediately and it audits it for you. What we've seen for all firms both large and small is that the benefits are on both sides because the faster that we make the payments to the firms, the more open they are to actually giving us better rates. So it’s been a win/win situation all around for small, large and us as the corporation with an e-billing system.

Rob Thomas: Can you speak to the process for companies to follow in selecting an e-billing system?

Lynn Molfetta: The greatest outcome of this overall endeavor for us was that both the lawyers at American Express, and the outside counsel firms once fully operational, began giving us great feedback on how much they loved this system. How easy it was to use and how responsive and time spent, it was just, increased the time and the efficiency just exponentially.

So it’s been nothing but spectacular in how we've been able to save money, drive efficiencies for our company, and really centralize the process that in the past has been decentralized and not working well at all until we implemented with an e-billing solution.

Rob Thomas: How does Electronic Billing integrate with the accounting systems of your company

Geneva Gilbertson: One of our IS programmers wrote an AP interface to our account payable department, now has the capability to literally lift the data out of the APS track in Serengeti and drop it into Oracle. This has clearly eliminated the need for that particular data entry and those people are very excited.

Rob Thomas: What types of potential savings are companies achieving when comparing savings with the cost of the system?

Lynn Molfetta: The savings that we get from the auditing system and making sure that the firms are submitting based on our retainer agreement has saved us several million dollars. And as far as what it costs us to manage our e-billing solution, it is based on matters. But the benefits absolutely outweigh what we are paying to this system by a 1000%.

■ TOP

Transcript

Webcast 2: Electronic Billing for Small Law Departments
The Association of Corporate Counsel Web Seminar

DESCRIPTION

Should your small law departments process its legal bills online? What benefits are small law departments getting from electronic billing? What are the challenges in doing e-billing, both for the law department and outside counsel? In this seminar, small law departments share their practical experiences with this rapidly growing technology (including a solo general counsel and the administrator of a small law department)

PARTICIPANTS

Rob Thomas: Vice President, Strategic Development, Serengeti Law (Moderator)
Steven Gray: Administrator, NSTAR Electric & Gas(Small law department)
James Sheets: VP and Corporate Counsel, Modspace (Small law department)

RESOURCES

Slide Presentation

HIGHLIGHTS

Rob Thomas: Did Modspace receive the savings that you were hoping for both in time and in spending?

James Sheets: We were able to realize some pretty significant savings, probably around $300,000 in savings. Part of that is from the electronic billing solution; part of that through more effective management of outside counsel and understanding what really should or should not be billed back to the company.

Rob Thomas: Talk about the resources, people, time, and major things that need to happen to get the system up and going.

Steve Gray: I was thinking, boy this is going to be a real project getting this thing going, but it was actually really quite easy and this system is very intuitive.

Rob Thomas: What has been your experience with Serengeti and internal audits?

Steve Gray: We had an internal audit this past year and our auditors were blown away by Serengeti. Once I started demonstrating the system, they were very, very impressed. They even made note of it to the CEO and the CFO that our financial controls in the legal department were some of the better controls that they had seen throughout the company. The general counsel was very, very pleased with that.

Rob Thomas: What kinds of pushback did you have from firms? How did you deal with it?

James Sheets: I think one reason there’s been very little pushback from the law firms, is that they view electronic billing as being in their interests as well because it allows them to send the invoice out quickly and with the expectation that they will be put in line for payment quickly as well.

Rob Thomas: Any Internal Pushback?

James Sheets: I think when you have visibility that highlights the areas where, from a compliance perspective or from a best practices perspective, we have room for improvement, you very quickly get over any sort of opposition or hesitation from in-house counsel.

Steve Gray: Attorneys found that it was great for them because all the information on a matter was in one place, totally organized. You can pull up a status report, you know exactly the whole history of the matter. You know where it stands on the budget so it makes the in-house attorneys look efficient.

■ TOP

TRANSCRIPT

Webcast 3: Managing Outside Counsel - Getting Off on the Right Foot and Staying in Step
The Association of Corporate Counsel Web Seminar

DESCRIPTION

A panel of in-house counsel from small, medium, and large departments share strategies used in developing and monitoring law department budgets.

PARTICIPANTS

Rob Thomas: Vice President, Strategic Development, Serengeti Law (Moderator)
Stuart Alderoty: Chief Litigation Counsel, American Express (Large law department)
Jeff Carr VP, General Counsel & Secretary, FMC Technologies (Medium law department)
Mark LoSacco: Head Litigation Counsel, American Express Travel Related Services (Small law department)

RESOURCES

HIGHLIGHTS

Rob Thomas: How do you track progress against a plan, and spending against the budget as you're moving through the project?

Mark LoSacco: The manner in which we monitor the budget is we get a report every week that's run every Tuesday. We get a package of reports and one of them is our budget versus spend.

Jeff Carr: What we care about is where are you going to be on budget if the firm is under spending on the budget and we get to bank that money and if they are over spending what are we going to do to get back. We only do things electronically and so we've got the tools through Serengeti to help us monitor what the budgetary performance is and what the spend is to actual.

Rob Thomas: What types of reports do you run to track spending against budget or status results?

Stuart Alderoty: We get a one page summary that will show us in the aggregate what we have paid for all of our outside counsel, litigation expenses from January 1 through to when the report has been run. On that same one page summary we compare that end number to the budget. You can look at it on the train ride home. You can look at it in the evening or you can look at it at your desk but it really gives you in five minutes you really get the sense of this is where we are as of this week in the year.

Mark LoSacco: These reports are the starting point for discussion with our outside counsel and allow us on a weekly basis to get a quick look at the overview of our case load. They also call out those outlier cases where the exposure is out of whack with the budget or the spend is moving too fast and we need to get in early and understand what the case is about and direct strategy.

Rob Thomas: How do you handle unforeseen circumstances, changes in a matter once you have a budget or a plan in place?

Mark LoSacco: If something changes or unanticipated event occurs we'll have a discussion with outside counsel. The main thing it does is we've found over the past 2.5 years of requiring these budgets shows the outside lawyers that we're actually looking at them.

Jeff Carr: As far as I'm concerned the reason we've hired that firm is because of their expertise and due to that they are in a better position than we are to accept the risk of being wrong in terms of what the budgets are and the unanticipated events. We do review them all the time but we do it in the context of the system that is a true partnering relationship with the law firm where they are accepting some of the risk and getting some of the rewards from efficient successful performance.

Rob Thomas: What is the relationship between budgets from outside counsel and your law department budget?

Stuart Alderoty: The starting point is we have a budget as we said for every single case and then we massage it based upon what we know based upon the prior two years and what we know about the industry litigation landscape as we approach the new year. We supply that number to the general counsel's office and we say, this is going to be our target forecast for the year. We have found that this carries weight later when you can explain what the variance is and then sort of give the credible explanation as to why you couldn't have reasonably anticipated earlier in the year.

We tell outside counsel all the time we're using your budgets to forecast to that we're going to be able to handle this entire inventory of cases for the year for this dollar amount and if you sandbag us you're not helping us. It's really though you're trying to reform the behavior of outside counsel. We're trying to formalize this by creating a report card for our outside counsel where one of the grades is accuracy of budget and a failing grade or you get a mid land grade for both under budgeting and over budgeting.

■ TOP

Transcript

Webcast 4: Tracking Outside Counsel Performance
The Association of Corporate Counsel Web Seminar

DESCRIPTION

A panel of in-house counsel from small, medium, and large departments will share strategies used in tracking outside counsel performance.

PARTICIPANTS

Rob Thomas: Vice President, Strategic Development, Serengeti Law (Moderator)
Mark LoSacco: Head Litigation Counsel, American Express Travel Related Services (Large department)
Mark Wolfe Assistant General Counsel, FMC Technologies (Medium law department)

RESOURCES

HIGHLIGHTS

Rob Thomas: I would like each company to talk briefly about how they collect the results they capture.

Mark Wolfe: The backbone of our tracking is Serengeti. Serengeti has a process where they scorecard various factors that are involved in the lessons learned. We have required in-house attorneys to not be able to close a matter until a lessons-learned comment is made in Serengeti for tracking purposes. It’s been real helpful to us. I think the last count, we have over 570 either lessons learned comments or trackings, so to speak.

Rob Thomas: What types of information are you looking for at the end of a legal project to assess the results and look for lessons learned?

Mark LoSacco: We look at the efficiency and predictive accuracy, and, in large part, we rely on Serengeti. We focus on the information that’s collected in Serengeti as the case goes on..

Rob Thomas: Do any of you have any performance-based compensation?

Mark Wolfe: We rank the outside counsel based on particular performance criteria and during the course of a matter under the ACES LT, we withhold 20 percent of outside counsel’s invoice. They send an invoice in for 10,000; we pay them 8,000, and we put 2,000 over to the side, so to speak.

■ TOP



Customers by Industry Customer Webcasts - Control OC Spending - Electronic Invoicing - E-billing at Small Depts. - Managing Counsel - Tracking Performance Case Studies Law Dept. Insights Law Firm Directory	PODCAST: How to Control Outside Counsel Spending (8MB - Right Click & "Save Target As...") Ask the No Nonsense Lawyer interview featuring Rob Thomas of Serengeti Law TABLE OF CONTENTS 1:46 Rob Thomas introduced 2:03 Project Management – What goes into a project management plan? 4:42 Retention Agreements - Aren’t retention agreements with your law firm enough? 6:00 Should the rules of engagement for litigation be different than for business transactions? 7:30 Are “outside counsel policies” the same as “retention agreements”? 8:13 What topics should be covered in retention agreements? 14:15 Recap of key topics for retention agreements 15:04 Are there special considerations for international engagements? 17:03 How do you neutralize a law firm’s reluctance to being managed? 21:28 Is requiring a budget unreasonable? 23:30 What are the common pitfalls when law departments ask for budgets? 27:21 Status Reports – What are your recommendations for frequency? 32:32 Recaps: The value of reviewing a project with your long time counsel 35:39: Reusing and sharing work product 37:40 Data Analysis – How do you identify non-firm vendors? 41:00 Using recap to reveal AFA opportunities 44:58 Alternative Fee Arrangements (AFA): Using recaps to assess the viability of a fixed or “capped” fee 47:40 How do you assess a firm’s track record to see if they are right for your project? 49:29 Spotlight – FMC Technologies – Using recaps to successfully move forward with your firms 55:36 What are the biggest mistakes law departments make when trying to manage outside counsel spending? 59:16 Rob Thomas providing contact information for Matrix of Retention Terms Copyright Business M.O., LLC. All rights reserved. Reproduced with permission.
	WEBCAST 1: Electronic Invoicing - It's not just for large law departments Featuring American Express, Sierra Health, and Resun Corporation How big do you have to be to be a potential candidate for electronic billing? Could you elaborate on the point that a smaller departments may need an e-billing system more larger ones? Can you speak to the process for companies to follow in selecting an e-billing system? How does Electronic Billing integrate with the accounting systems of your company? What types of potential savings are companies achieving when comparing savings with the cost of the system?
	WEBCAST 2: Electronic Billing For Small Law Departments Featuring NStar Electric & Gas and Modspace Did Modspace receive the savings that you were hoping for both in time and in spending? Talk about the resources, people, time, and major things that need to happen to get the system up and going. What has been your experience with Serengeti and internal audits? What kinds of pushback did you have from firms? How did you deal with it? Any internal pushback?
	Webcast 3: Managing Outside Counsel - Getting off on the right foot & staying in step Featuring American Express, American Express Travel Related Services, and FMC Technologies How do you track progress against a plan, and spending against the budget as you're moving through the project? What types of reports do you run to track spending against budget or status results? How do you handle unforeseen circumstances, changes in a matter once you have a budget or a plan in place? What is the relationship between budgets from outside counsel and your law department budget?
	Webcast 4: Tracking Outside counsel performance Featuring American Express Travel Related Services and FMC Technologies I would like each company to talk briefly about how they collect the results they capture. What types of information are you looking for at the end of a legal project to assess the results and lessons learned? Do any of you have any performance-based compensation?
	TRANSCRIPT Webcast 1: Electronic Invoicing - It's Not Just for Large Law Departments The Association of Corporate Counsel Web Seminar DESCRIPTION Should your law department process legal bills online? From the world’s largest legal departments to those with a single attorney, companies are using electronic billing to save time and control their spending. PARTICIPANTS Rob Thomas: Vice President, Strategic Development, Serengeti Law (Moderator) Lynn Molfetta: Global Legal Administrator, American Express (Large law department) Geneva Gilbertson: Law Department Administrator, Sierra Health (Medium law department) James Sheets: VP and Corporate Counsel, Resun Corporation (Small law department) RESOURCES Slide Presentation Questions & Answers HIGHLIGHTS Rob Thomas: How big do you have to be to make you a potential candidate for electronic billing? James Sheets: Return on the investment has been incredible. One important component in saving outside counsel fees has been electronic billing. It’s made me much more efficient. It’s increased the discipline on the part of the law firms. It’s helped track spending to the budget, which from my perspective, when reporting to the President of the company as to how we’re doing in outside counsel spending, is incredibly important. Rob Thomas: Could you elaborate on the point that a smaller departments may need an e-billing system more larger ones? James Sheets: One reason why electronic billing may actually benefit the smaller department is that it doesn’t have the resources as opposed to a 15 or 20 attorney law department. I don’t have the manpower or the resources available to go through the bills each month, to audit them and yet to manage and meet my job responsibilities. Having an electronic billing system almost adds a head count to the legal department and removes time consuming responsibilities from my shoulders, and instead, automates it. Lynn Molfetta: When you are on an electronic billing system, you get the bill immediately and it audits it for you. What we've seen for all firms both large and small is that the benefits are on both sides because the faster that we make the payments to the firms, the more open they are to actually giving us better rates. So it’s been a win/win situation all around for small, large and us as the corporation with an e-billing system. Rob Thomas: Can you speak to the process for companies to follow in selecting an e-billing system? Lynn Molfetta: The greatest outcome of this overall endeavor for us was that both the lawyers at American Express, and the outside counsel firms once fully operational, began giving us great feedback on how much they loved this system. How easy it was to use and how responsive and time spent, it was just, increased the time and the efficiency just exponentially. So it’s been nothing but spectacular in how we've been able to save money, drive efficiencies for our company, and really centralize the process that in the past has been decentralized and not working well at all until we implemented with an e-billing solution. Rob Thomas: How does Electronic Billing integrate with the accounting systems of your company Geneva Gilbertson: One of our IS programmers wrote an AP interface to our account payable department, now has the capability to literally lift the data out of the APS track in Serengeti and drop it into Oracle. This has clearly eliminated the need for that particular data entry and those people are very excited. Rob Thomas: What types of potential savings are companies achieving when comparing savings with the cost of the system? Lynn Molfetta: The savings that we get from the auditing system and making sure that the firms are submitting based on our retainer agreement has saved us several million dollars. And as far as what it costs us to manage our e-billing solution, it is based on matters. But the benefits absolutely outweigh what we are paying to this system by a 1000%. ■ TOP
	Transcript Webcast 2: Electronic Billing for Small Law Departments The Association of Corporate Counsel Web Seminar DESCRIPTION Should your small law departments process its legal bills online? What benefits are small law departments getting from electronic billing? What are the challenges in doing e-billing, both for the law department and outside counsel? In this seminar, small law departments share their practical experiences with this rapidly growing technology (including a solo general counsel and the administrator of a small law department) PARTICIPANTS Rob Thomas: Vice President, Strategic Development, Serengeti Law (Moderator) Steven Gray: Administrator, NSTAR Electric & Gas(Small law department) James Sheets: VP and Corporate Counsel, Modspace (Small law department) RESOURCES Slide Presentation HIGHLIGHTS Rob Thomas: Did Modspace receive the savings that you were hoping for both in time and in spending? James Sheets: We were able to realize some pretty significant savings, probably around $300,000 in savings. Part of that is from the electronic billing solution; part of that through more effective management of outside counsel and understanding what really should or should not be billed back to the company. Rob Thomas: Talk about the resources, people, time, and major things that need to happen to get the system up and going. Steve Gray: I was thinking, boy this is going to be a real project getting this thing going, but it was actually really quite easy and this system is very intuitive. Rob Thomas: What has been your experience with Serengeti and internal audits? Steve Gray: We had an internal audit this past year and our auditors were blown away by Serengeti. Once I started demonstrating the system, they were very, very impressed. They even made note of it to the CEO and the CFO that our financial controls in the legal department were some of the better controls that they had seen throughout the company. The general counsel was very, very pleased with that. Rob Thomas: What kinds of pushback did you have from firms? How did you deal with it? James Sheets: I think one reason there’s been very little pushback from the law firms, is that they view electronic billing as being in their interests as well because it allows them to send the invoice out quickly and with the expectation that they will be put in line for payment quickly as well. Rob Thomas: Any Internal Pushback? James Sheets: I think when you have visibility that highlights the areas where, from a compliance perspective or from a best practices perspective, we have room for improvement, you very quickly get over any sort of opposition or hesitation from in-house counsel. Steve Gray: Attorneys found that it was great for them because all the information on a matter was in one place, totally organized. You can pull up a status report, you know exactly the whole history of the matter. You know where it stands on the budget so it makes the in-house attorneys look efficient. ■ TOP
	TRANSCRIPT Webcast 3: Managing Outside Counsel - Getting Off on the Right Foot and Staying in Step The Association of Corporate Counsel Web Seminar DESCRIPTION A panel of in-house counsel from small, medium, and large departments share strategies used in developing and monitoring law department budgets. PARTICIPANTS Rob Thomas: Vice President, Strategic Development, Serengeti Law (Moderator) Stuart Alderoty: Chief Litigation Counsel, American Express (Large law department) Jeff Carr VP, General Counsel & Secretary, FMC Technologies (Medium law department) Mark LoSacco: Head Litigation Counsel, American Express Travel Related Services (Small law department) RESOURCES Sample Engagement Letter FMC Legal Team Organization HIGHLIGHTS Rob Thomas: How do you track progress against a plan, and spending against the budget as you're moving through the project? Mark LoSacco: The manner in which we monitor the budget is we get a report every week that's run every Tuesday. We get a package of reports and one of them is our budget versus spend. Jeff Carr: What we care about is where are you going to be on budget if the firm is under spending on the budget and we get to bank that money and if they are over spending what are we going to do to get back. We only do things electronically and so we've got the tools through Serengeti to help us monitor what the budgetary performance is and what the spend is to actual. Rob Thomas: What types of reports do you run to track spending against budget or status results? Stuart Alderoty: We get a one page summary that will show us in the aggregate what we have paid for all of our outside counsel, litigation expenses from January 1 through to when the report has been run. On that same one page summary we compare that end number to the budget. You can look at it on the train ride home. You can look at it in the evening or you can look at it at your desk but it really gives you in five minutes you really get the sense of this is where we are as of this week in the year. Mark LoSacco: These reports are the starting point for discussion with our outside counsel and allow us on a weekly basis to get a quick look at the overview of our case load. They also call out those outlier cases where the exposure is out of whack with the budget or the spend is moving too fast and we need to get in early and understand what the case is about and direct strategy. Rob Thomas: How do you handle unforeseen circumstances, changes in a matter once you have a budget or a plan in place? Mark LoSacco: If something changes or unanticipated event occurs we'll have a discussion with outside counsel. The main thing it does is we've found over the past 2.5 years of requiring these budgets shows the outside lawyers that we're actually looking at them. Jeff Carr: As far as I'm concerned the reason we've hired that firm is because of their expertise and due to that they are in a better position than we are to accept the risk of being wrong in terms of what the budgets are and the unanticipated events. We do review them all the time but we do it in the context of the system that is a true partnering relationship with the law firm where they are accepting some of the risk and getting some of the rewards from efficient successful performance. Rob Thomas: What is the relationship between budgets from outside counsel and your law department budget? Stuart Alderoty: The starting point is we have a budget as we said for every single case and then we massage it based upon what we know based upon the prior two years and what we know about the industry litigation landscape as we approach the new year. We supply that number to the general counsel's office and we say, this is going to be our target forecast for the year. We have found that this carries weight later when you can explain what the variance is and then sort of give the credible explanation as to why you couldn't have reasonably anticipated earlier in the year. We tell outside counsel all the time we're using your budgets to forecast to that we're going to be able to handle this entire inventory of cases for the year for this dollar amount and if you sandbag us you're not helping us. It's really though you're trying to reform the behavior of outside counsel. We're trying to formalize this by creating a report card for our outside counsel where one of the grades is accuracy of budget and a failing grade or you get a mid land grade for both under budgeting and over budgeting. ■ TOP
	Transcript Webcast 4: Tracking Outside Counsel Performance The Association of Corporate Counsel Web Seminar DESCRIPTION A panel of in-house counsel from small, medium, and large departments will share strategies used in tracking outside counsel performance. PARTICIPANTS Rob Thomas: Vice President, Strategic Development, Serengeti Law (Moderator) Mark LoSacco: Head Litigation Counsel, American Express Travel Related Services (Large department) Mark Wolfe Assistant General Counsel, FMC Technologies (Medium law department) RESOURCES Slide Presentation Decision Tree Example HIGHLIGHTS Rob Thomas: I would like each company to talk briefly about how they collect the results they capture. Mark Wolfe: The backbone of our tracking is Serengeti. Serengeti has a process where they scorecard various factors that are involved in the lessons learned. We have required in-house attorneys to not be able to close a matter until a lessons-learned comment is made in Serengeti for tracking purposes. It’s been real helpful to us. I think the last count, we have over 570 either lessons learned comments or trackings, so to speak. Rob Thomas: What types of information are you looking for at the end of a legal project to assess the results and look for lessons learned? Mark LoSacco: We look at the efficiency and predictive accuracy, and, in large part, we rely on Serengeti. We focus on the information that’s collected in Serengeti as the case goes on.. Rob Thomas: Do any of you have any performance-based compensation? Mark Wolfe: We rank the outside counsel based on particular performance criteria and during the course of a matter under the ACES LT, we withhold 20 percent of outside counsel’s invoice. They send an invoice in for 10,000; we pay them 8,000, and we put 2,000 over to the side, so to speak. ■ TOP