“10 Ways That Outside Counsel Disguise Overbilling“.
Headline of a December 17, 2019 article in Corporate Counsel, a prominent publication directed to in-house lawyers.
Citing the Association of Corporate Counsel’s findings in its “2019 Global Legal Department Benchmarking Report”, the article begins with this statement of fact:
” … Large companies with big legal departments go over budget by about 37% every single year.
“Why do they go over budget? A big reason is overbilling from the outside law firms they hire to do work for them.”
…
Cost overruns of that size.
And inaccuracies in charges imposed on clients by people who serve as fiduciaries (attorneys) to the clients harmed by those inaccuracies.
Inaccuracies that advantage those outside firms — not ones that result in under-charges.
How did this become business as usual? How can it be that such overruns and billing inaccuracies are normalized?
What’s so wrong with this area of Legal — outside lawyers’ charges to client companies — that the article’s author, Ryan Loro, can be part of an entire industry — “legal bill auditing” — that checks up on the accuracy of what lawyers bill their clients? And gets paid solely from the excess of what law firms charge over what they agreed to charge (i.e., no net cost to the client)?