Best Practices for Ethically Managing Legal Spend: Before, During, and After Litigation (Update)

One of the biggest challenges facing today's corporations and law firms is engaging high quality legal representation in litigation while, at the same time, ensuring that the work is carried out by the most cost-effective and reasonable measures in accordance with the Rules of Professional Conduct governing attorney ethics. This course, presented by Wyatt Partners (a corporation that focuses exclusively on the subject of legal fees), addresses today's hot topics in legal spend management – both from an in-house and outside counsel perspective throughout the entire litigation process.

From Engagement Agreements, Budgets, and Outside Counsel Billing Guidelines, our speakers will highlight certain best practices for both counsel and client before the litigation process even begins. The program will then focus on communication and case management issues that occur during the litigation, amidst e-discovery, motion practice, expert disclosures, trial, and appeal. Finally, our speakers will explore the benefits of the self-evaluation process (between client and counsel) after the litigation is over.

The program will specifically focus on applicable Rules of Professional Conduct and case law, as well as the wide foray of experience our speakers have gained serving as fee experts across the United States and Europe as well as advisors to corporations and law firms with respect to managing legal spend.  Both law firms and corporations will benefit greatly from such insights on a timely and evolving topic that affects everyone in today's legal and business market.

Learning Objectives:

1. Identify best practices for ethical pre-litigation legal spend management, including the selection of outside counsel, engagement agreements, budgets, outside counsel billing guidelines, preparing for e-discovery costs, and the roles of the client (and possibly third-party payors)
2. Acquire strategies for ethical legal spend management during the actual litigation, including the case management of the required workload (motion practice, discovery, trial, etc.), and miscellaneous lessons learned by both counsel and client
3. Develop best practices for ethical legal spend management after litigation is over, including assessing Outside Counsel Billing Guidelines, conducting a cost-benefit analysis, and communications between counsel and client in preparation for future litigation
4. Identifying, evaluating, and managing other variables that affect litigation fees/expenses