Successful Partnering Between Inside and Outside Counsel, 4 vols.

• Author: Rickerson, Stuart E.

Successful Partnership Between Inside and Outside Counsel. Edited by Robert L. Haig. West Group, 620 Opperman Drive, P.O. Box 64833, St. Paul, MN 55164-9777 (to order: 1-800-344-5009). Four looseleaf volumes and two disks, 6,032 pages. Updated annually. $350.00 ($245.00 to members of the American Corporate Counsel Association). (Reviewed by IADC member Stuart E. Rickerson, vice president, general counsel and secretary of Alaris Medical Systems Inc., a global presence in advanced patient monitoring technology and intravenuous infusion therapy instruments and related services.)

What can you expect when the largest organization of corporate counsel in the world and one of the largest legal publishers and providers of legal e-information team up to produce a comprehensive guide explaining how the best corporate law departments and their outside counsel work together? Just a tad more than 6,000 pages of some of the best insights into the practice of corporate law ever compiled, that's what.

The American Corporate Counsel Association, with nearly 20,000 corporate counsel members, more than half of whom are general counsel, and the West Group do not disappoint with Successful Partnership Between Inside and Outside Counsel. Edited by Kelley Drye & Warren LLP partner Robert L. Haig, this compendium contains contributions from more than 80 general counsel and senior corporate counsel of Fortune 500 companies. Each of the chapters is co-authored by senior partners of major national and international law firms, as well as a handful of legal consultants.

This is a "must buy" for every corporate law department and law firms that represents corporations. Many lawyers seem to agree, as the set is already in its third printing.

A lot for legal services

In the aggregate, corporations spend more than $100 billion per year on outside counsel fees. PriceWaterhouseCooper's 16th Annual U.S. Law Department Spending Survey pegs the median amount spent by corporations on legal services at $11.7 million annually. Many companies spend many multiples of that amount. Corporate counsel have a special need for access to benchmarks and best practice standards, as a recent ACCA/Spherion Corp. survey found. Top executives of corporations responding to the survey expect more from in-house counsel than they do from their outside counsel, and they think corporate counsel deliver more "by a wide margin." Nearly 70 percent rate their in-house counsel performance as "excellent," while they rate outside counsel performance as "excellent" only 15 percent of the time.

Those statistics should send chills up the spines of law firm partners who represent corporate America. They should be reason enough for any law firm to order this set of books as an inexpensive way to find out what their corporate clients expect. If law firms need more justification, look at the economics of the practice of major law firms over the past decade, with its double-digit annual revenue growth and with median partnership profits exceeding $500,000 annually in each of the top 104 law firms in the nation. (See Singer, "While the Rich Get Richer," American Lawyer August 2001.) With aggregate revenues in many firms approaching or exceeding $100 million annually, some law firms are even beginning to manage their practices as the businesses they are.

Others out there

With so much at stake, it is surprising that no book has been published which so comprehensively advises these corporations and their outside law firms how to anticipate, protect, assert and advance their legal interests, or better assure that their money...