Legal Mosaic Essays on Legal Delivery

<strong>Legal</strong> <strong>Mosaic</strong>: <strong>Essays</strong> on <strong>Legal</strong> Delivery
providers. Donny Ching, his predecessors, and colleagues have demonstrated
what a well-managed, aggressive, and value-driven law firm—albeit
an in-house one—can do to streamline legal delivery and to address
client needs. They have shown that a legal department (law firm) can
undertake successful restructuring, streamline process, effect standardization,
assume increased responsibility for work the team is especially
competent to handle, maintain an integrated, collaborative approach, and
more efficiently, seamlessly, and cost-effectively deploy outside resources
when they are necessary and under terms that ensure such deployment
drives client value.
Translation: Shell is sending what should be a sobering message to ALL
law firms (in-house and outside) that the representation of multinationals
and other corporations is not their birthright. Other options exist--including
an ever-growing array of legal service as well as product providers-
-and it is incumbent upon law firms to deliver greater value lest they
be further marginalized. But don’t take my word for it; Donny Ching
was recently quoted in The Lawyer cautioning: “Law firms talk about
understanding the client and business partnership—but if they don’t understand
that and how that evolution is taking place now, they are going
to miss out. It’s the hard truth.”
Conclusion
For those who dismiss the Shell example as an in-house outlier—albeit
a very large and powerful one-- consider this: one in four lawyers in the
UK now practices in-house, and that number has doubled since 2000.
Perhaps clients really are bulking up and flexing. And legal service providers,
especially outside law firms, better get fit quickly lest, as Mr. Ching
admonishes they “miss out.”
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