Hiring Outside Counsel for businesses can be costly, especially when dealing in different jurisdictions. Therefore, a business needs to take initiatives to help them achieve a balance between hiring high-quality lawyers in multiple jurisdictions and keeping legal costs down. Managers can manage their relationships with various lawyers by drafting an engagement letter containing Outside Counsel Guidelines, as proposed by Miller (2020). There ten things managers can do, especially to address billing and invoicing, as discussed by the author. Among these things is highlighting the manner the company would like to be invoiced by the law firm. For instance, the law firm must include in-depth details describing their bills that should be invoiced and paid monthly to avoid complications of overdue payments that can ruin the relationship between the company and the outside counsel.
Likewise, another method that can be used by the business to manage its legal staff should also include retention and staffing in t erms of the engagement letter. In that sense, the company and the outside counsel should choose a specific lawyer representing the business in all its legal proceedings. Moreover, the company should also establish a structure to manage litigations. The outside counsel must be work hand in hand with the company Legal Staff to assess the firm’s position in responding to litigation issues ( Berry, 2018) . To minimize the litigation costs that might be encountered, the legal team should strive to use the Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR). These are a set of techniques, such as mediation or arbitration, that can be used to settle disputes without litigation. The main benefit of the ADR is that the parties are collaboratively involved in resolving their differences through understanding the position held by each party.
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References
AmericanBarAssociation. (2018). Dispute Resolution Processes . Americanbar.Org. https://www.americanbar.org/groups/dispute_resolution/resources/DisputeResolutionProcesses/
Berry, J. (2018). Managing legal information professionals. In BIALL Handbook of Legal Information Management (pp. 173-202). Routledge.
Miller, S. (2020). Ten Things You Need to Know as In-House Counsel® . Ten Things You Need to Know as In-House Counsel®. https://sterlingmiller2014.wordpress.com/