Procurement of Legal Services: How Customers Professionally Procure Legal Services Today

When companies need legal services, they typically turn to outside counsel and law firms (“buy”; BigLaw). Increasingly, larger companies start or enlarge the work force of their legal departments to perform the required legal services (“make”; insourcing). As a new option, the legal branches of the big auditing firms (Big Four) and alternative legal service providers (NewLaw, e.g., LPO) are also being considered. Depending on the customer’s (The term “customer” is uniformly applied to both clients of outside counsel and internal customers of legal departments to express the view that providing legal advice is considered a service with customer orientation in either case.) experience and whether or not a company has its own legal department, the purchase of these services, which in particular includes the selection process on the one hand, and the appointment and management of attorneys on the other hand, may occur differently. However, the questions to be raised and the topics to be addressed in this context remain the same. Although the relationship between customer and outside counsel will continue to be diverse, it is mutually beneficial to understand both sides and to recognize the different facets of such a relationship. Further, in any event such legal services and advice cannot stand alone but must fit into an overall solution for the customer’s problem and the challenge he is facing. This article seeks to provide a first overview and to systematically investigate the questions to be posed during the professional procurement of legal services from third party providers, be it outside counsel and law firms or other alternative suppliers. (This article is based on the following publication: Mascello, Bruno (2015) Beschaffung von Rechtsdienstleistungen und Management externer Anwälte, Schulthess Zürich (also to be published in English soon). There, you can find further comments and explanations, sources and references as well as an extensive bibliography. For the sake of readability and brevity, this article uses the masculine form of pronouns only, but the feminine form should always be understood to be included as well.)