Buying Legal: Procurement Insights and Practices

Number of Pages: 177

Recent studies are proving that procurement is indeed involved in the purchasing of legal services and it’s swiftly becoming the ‘new normal.’

Larger corporations in particular engage procurement, not only for sourcing low-end, routine or commoditised legal services, but increasingly for higher-stakes legal work as well.

But that doesn’t mean that law firms or in-house legal and procurement teams are well equipped to deal with this new landscape and to make these new relationships successful.

Managing Partner’s report - Buying Legal: Procurement Insights and Practice addresses the key challenges and opportunities that buying and selling legal services creates – from relationship building and management, to financial and strategic decision- making.

Packed with original research, case studies, opinion pieces, practical approaches, and checklists the first half of the report looks at procurement from the law firm perspective, covering topics including:

• Benchmarking the procurement of legal services;
• Pricing and negotiation strategies;
• Bulk buying of legal services;
• Understanding the requirements of the procurement department;
• Successful complex tendering;
• Current trends in the procurement of international legal services;
• Building relationships with the CPO;
• Procurement departments sourcing strategies;
• Pricing evolution and interfacing with the sourcing processes; and
• The concept of supply management.

The second half of this report looks at the challenges faced by in-house lawyers and procurement professionals, including:

• Understanding procurement’s role in purchasing legal services;
• The positive and negative effects of discounts;
• Effective collaboration between sourcing and legal;
• Top tips for successfully procuring legal services;
• Trusted advisor relationships co-exist with legal procurement;
• The changing role of procurement and its relationship with senior management;
• Starting a legal procurement initiative;
• Trusted tactics to get the most from spending on outside services;
• Selecting and managing outside law firms;
• Demonstrating law department value through analytics; and
• Using technology to source legal services.