Legal Marketing & PR

DuPont Law Firm Model Cracks

By Edward Poll, J.D., M.B.A., CMC

In an article in the ABA Journal, DuPont is reported to be looking at regional law firms, not just Big Law, for its outside counsel arrangements. DuPont started the trend to consolidate its outside counsel needs into fewer, larger law firms. This made sense. The more you can consolidate your resource needs, the lower per unit fee you can negotiate because of your increased power. Also, you can reduce your costs of operation because you have fewer billing statements to review, enabling you to keep better track of the accounting and reduce inadvertent errors.

As I've written before, however, Big Law, with all of the negotiating power of DuPont, still charges more than smaller firms with lower overhead and a smaller profit appetite. They're hungrier for the business. I chided ACCA and its members for failing to see this.

They are about to get the message ... good news for the smaller law firms whose quality of legal work is equal and whose economic appetite are more reasonable.

Full post as published by Law Biz Blog on April 12, 2009 (boomark / email).