Top 10 'cost' tips: advice from the General Counsel panel.

• Author: Griffiths, Lindsay

Here are the top 10 cost tips (with five quotables) from the General Counsel panel with Stephen Kaplan, the senior vice president and general counsel for Connextions, Inc., Jeff Novak, the general counsel for AOL Paid Services, and John Lewis Jr., the senior managing counsel-litigation for The Coca-Cola Company:

1. Find un-met needs for your GCs--this is a different value proposition than that offered by your competitors.

2. Firms that know the secret to cost containment in their own firms should be able to help GCs apply those principles in their department.

3. GCs hire firms not lawyers.

4. GCs are stewards of their company's resources and expect that law firms should treat them as such. Firms need to know what things cost and how to position their clients to look good. GCs are cost centers, and firms that show sensitivity and awareness of this are the ones in the main with whom they work better.

5. "Cost is just another species of risk to be managed."

6. "You can't find un-met client needs if you don't do your best to find out."

7. "When you've prepared me with intelligence on something going on, I can then use that in my...