Legal Costs: 5 Ways to Help Your Clients Reduce Their Legal Spend

Ron Friedmann’s “Open Letter to General Counsels: Five Imperatives for 2012” on his blog Strategic Legal Technology. Spoiler alert:  Friedmann’s imperatives for GCs are all about controlling costs. But that’s not particularly surprising, since the cost of legal services is something that 65% of the general counsel surveyed by Corporate Counsel indicated they would like to change in 2012.

So why should an outside lawyer read a post that advises her clients how to save money by spending less on outside lawyers? The cynic would respond: “because she must adapt or die,” but there’s more to it than that. The outside lawyer (let’s call her “you” in this example) should read Friedmann’s post because it describes how you can improve your relationships with your clients, how you can help those clients meet their own personal and professional objectives, and how you can maintain and possibly expand crucial client relationships.

Read the post. Talk to your clients. Help them determine what problems they need to solve, how much law is enough, the legal resources they need for the issues they have to resolve, how they can measure costs (and value), how to get more for less. Because, as Friedmann writes, “if you can’t do that, others can.”