First Law

Corporate Counsel: The success scale

Legal week - Thursday 1st November 2007

Exctract from an article by Michelle Madsen

Anthony Armitage, former Commerce & Industry Group vice president and head of legal consultancy First Law, says giving law firms rankings is about more than just helping in-house teams justify their budgets — it is also about forcing law firms to become more transparent about their costs.

“We have been trying to do ranking of lawyers for a long time, but firms just do not want to put in the information,” he says. “We compile information on every tender but we do not make this publicly available due to the attitude of some of the firms that we are dealing with.”

Acting as a panel broker for a clientele mainly composed of public sector bodies, Armitage says more in-house teams should follow the lead of UBS, HSBC and Zurich if they really want to have the power to demand value for money from their firms.

“Many general counsel say it is too difficult to act upon the impulse to rank firms, claiming that the nature of legal work is too complex to quantify,” he says. “This is something that law firms will be pleased to hear. But the fact of the matter is that some people have started ranking firms and it has worked. The task of ranking firms does get complex with different types of work — you have to look at different types of standard transactions and then look at how much different types of lawyers charge.”