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Partnering: The Future of Legal Services Has Arrived

By Jacqueline Pennino Scheib
November 01, 2003

Over 10 years ago, E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company adopted a model for the procurement of legal services that is based on strict legal spending rules, including early case assessment measures, consolidation of law firms and service providers handling DuPont work, and implementation of numerous other cost-saving measures. The DuPont model, which is commonly referred to as “partnering,” has become a platform for the efforts of an increasing number of companies to revamp their legal service expectations and implement changes that embrace partnering between in-house and outside attorneys.

Despite the amount of time that partnering has survived and the increasing number of companies adopting a partnering model, most outside counsel still meet the concept of partnering with great skepticism. This skepticism is bred from both an inability to envision the future of the legal services market and the misconception that the sole goal of partnering is to reduce legal bills for corporations at the expense of law firm revenues.

To understand where the legal market is headed, it is helpful to examine why partnering has been so successful. The concept was embraced largely because the role of in-house counsel has changed dramatically. Many in-house attorneys used to act solely as a liaison between the company and outside counsel. Today, in-house attorneys work longer hours, deal with more sophisticated work, and are expected to better manage the “business” of their department, in part, by ensuring that the fees paid to outside counsel are comparable to the value of the achieved results. Of course, these elements do add up to a reduction in legal bills for corporations. However, to conclude that this reduction is the sole purpose of partnering and is always at the expense of reduced revenues for law firms is to view partnering too simplistically.

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