White Papers | Survey Shows What Keeps Corporate Counsel Awake At Night
A new survey from Fulbright & Jaworski L.L.P. sheds new light on what corporate counsel really cares about. The survey offers lessons for law firms and other professional service firms about how to maintain and strengthen client relationships.
For instance, Fulbright found that communication, being responsive and delivering information when promised are sure ways for law firms to maintain a positive relationship with their clients. Failures on each of those are among the biggest pet peeves of respondents. Meanwhile, electronic discovery is emerging as a major concern of corporate counsel, as is the burden of their respective document retention programs.
Through the strategic use of technology tools we describe as Firm Management applications, your firm can satisfy these client-driven requirements for real-time communications and enhanced integration. These applications include an integrated suite of tools that include the following:
- Document Management – In many law firms, documents are scattered in file cabinets, on personal and network hard drives, in e-mail text or attachments, at offsite locations or on removable media. A fully integrated document management system can enable your law firm to establish a sound archival policy, implement role-based security and generate a detailed document audit trail, while also allowing attorneys to use these capabilities from anywhere. Additionally, a document management system can empower your law firm to track and control exactly what happens to a document when it starts circulating.
- Case Management – These applications include centralized calendaring, contact management, task management, document assembly and electronic access to case data normally held in paper files. By interfacing seamlessly with all your major existing software: accounting, time and billing, document management and e-mail, they enable staff and attorneys to share information, thereby helping prevent duplicate data entry.
- Docket Management – A firm wide docketing system can integrate with your firm's e-mail and case management systems to automatically calculate the critical due dates and post these deadlines as well as reminders for the same, on firm wide calendars. This results in a true firm wide legal docketing system, ensuring that if a key date changes, the system adjusts all corresponding deadlines accordingly.
The survey of 354 corporate counsel explores views on the state of litigation in the United States as well as in the United Kingdom. Key findings include:
1) Fulbright asked the in-house lawyers to identify the distinguishing characteristics of their least successful outside counsel. Among the most irritating: lawyers who overcharge, communicate poorly, are unresponsive, are slow or late in delivering information, know little about the client's business and are unreliable.
2) Eighty-seven percent of U.S. companies are engaged in some form of litigation in the U.S. While the U.S. health care industry had the greatest number of pending litigation matters in the U.S., energy companies were second in line with 49 pending litigation cases.
3) Few U.S. companies don't have an in-house counsel whose job is to manage litigation. Only eight percent of corporate law departments manage to get by without a staff lawyer managing company litigation matters. The most common types of cases on the in-house litigation docket are contracts claims and labor/employment matters.
4) Asked to identify the biggest litigation-related burden that did not exist three years ago, in-house counsel pointed to electronic discovery as the number one headache, followed by "increased regulatory/compliance" issues, which is a certain legacy of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.
5) For more than half of U.S. corporate counsel, a successful finish is more important than how fast they get there. Asked how their success is measured, more than 50 percent identified good results as the number one benchmark.
6) Eighty-one percent of U.S. corporate counsel surveyed said that their companies now have written records retention policies. Larger corporations are more likely to have such policies in place than smaller companies, as are manufacturers and financial companies.
7) For the most part, U.S. respondents are satisfied with the jobs their outside counsel are doing. When asked what message they would most like to deliver to their outside lawyers, the number one message was "control costs," a sentiment shared by more than a third of respondents. Cost containment outpaced the desire to tell outside lawyers to "win cases," "get results," "be proactive" or other similar case-oriented messages. Nearly a quarter of those surveyed said some variation of "keep up the good work."
Greenwood Surveys, an independent research firm in Houston, Texas, conducted the survey during June and July of 2005. For a direct link to survey results, go to: http://www.fulbright.com/media/litigation.
