Alternative Fees

Inside Straight: Alternative Fee Agreements For Beginners

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Egad! The General Counsel just announced that your target for next year will be to handle 20 percent of all outside legal spend on an alternative fee basis! What do you do?

You can’t just do flat fee agreements! What happens if you agree to pay too much, and you’ve given away your client’s money? And success-based fees are a great idea, but they’re impossible to calculate! How does anyone know at the start of a piece of (non-routine) litigation what the case is worth? Since you don’t know the value of the matter, you can’t set the target from which you’ll judge success.

What’s an in-house lawyer to do?

Calm down. Here’s a way to ease into alternative fee agreements that will put neither you nor your outside firms at risk, will educate you slowly over time, and will meet your internal objectives….

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Non-Sequiturs: 03.14.11

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Paul Oekten

* “How can I keep other people from stealing my idea?” If you’re hoping to do so through copyright law, good luck. [Law of Fashion]

* Howrey CEO Robert Ruyak blamed alternative fee arrangements for contributing to Howrey’s downfall, but Jay Shepherd isn’t buying it. [The Client Revolution]

* Speaking of Howrey, former partners have been picked up in recent days by Venable, Covington, and Arnold & Porter. [Am Law Daily]

* Paul Oetken, the openly gay New York lawyer nominated to the S.D.N.Y. bench, has received a “unanimously qualified” rating from the ABA. [Poliglot / Metro Weekly]

* For-profit colleges are under legal attack; could law schools be next? [STLtoday.com]

* What do great jazz musicians and successful trial lawyers share in common? [Underdog]

* What are some strategies for playing hooky from your Biglaw job? [Corporate Monkey Lawyer]

* It’s Pi Day. Or is it Pie Day? How about everybody eats 3.14 slices of pie so they’re covered both ways. [Pls Clarify via Blawg Review]

* It’s NCAA tournament time. Join our group “Above the Law Blog” with the password “abovethelaw” and fill out a bracket. The top three finishers will get ATL t-shirts (and mad respect from lawyers who like to procrastinate everywhere). [ESPN]

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A Hot New Trend: Leaving Biglaw to Start Your Own Firm

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People are talking about an interesting Slate article entitled “Leaving Big Law Behind: The many frustrations that cause well-paid lawyers to hang out their own shingles.” It’s currently the most-read piece on the site. But it’s actually quite similar, even down to some of the sources, to an article that appeared a few days earlier in Crain’s New York Business:

A lawyer’s hourly billing rate used to be a badge of pride — the higher the number, the more valuable (and supposedly brilliant) the lawyer. But over the past 18 months, a strange phenomenon has been sweeping the legal arena: Partners at major law firms are quitting because they want to be able to charge less for their services.

This is, of course, not a new development. Kash and I wrote about it in a December 2009 cover story for Washingtonian magazine, in which we interviewed a former member of the $1,000-an-hour club who left a large law firm and started his own shop so he could offer clients better value. But all the recent coverage — in Crain’s, Slate, and elsewhere — suggests that the trend is picking up steam.

Which kinds of lawyers are leaving Biglaw to hang up their own shingles? Why are they doing it? And how’s it going for them?

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