Hearsay: Dissatisfied
Corporations might be cutting down on the use of outside legal counsel in 2017, according to a report by legal technology provider Liquid Litigation Management. According to the study, in-house teams are dissatisfied with law firm performance and plan to spend less on outside counsel, opting instead to do the work themselves. LLM found that corporations think law firms are not as efficient as they should be, particularly in the area of technology use.Source: The State of the Legal Industry (Dec. 22, 2016).
	Survey Says	Corporate in-house attorneys face a significant risk of cyberattack, according to a 2016 incident response survey by the SANS Institute that polled over 500 corporate IT professionals. According to security experts, legal departments have a higher probability of compromise because they aren’t as aware of active threats against them, such as phishing and suspicious emails, as are IT professionals, software engineers and security experts.
Source: legaltechnews.com (Dec. 8, 2016).
Pay Up
Top firms are increasingly suing clients for unpaid bills. According to the New York Law Journal, fee litigation by white-shoe firms has been rising over the past few years. Firms that have won judgments after being stiffed or are pursuing court actions to collect include Sullivan & Cromwell, Shearman & Sterling and Perkins Coie.
Source: newyorklawjournal.com (Dec. 2, 2016).
	$5,000 Less
	According to a Harvard Business Review study, the political leanings of BigLaw partners influence how much women are paid. The HBR research, based on donations data from the Federal Election Commission, showed a gender pay gap in annual bonuses that was minimal for liberal partners but larger for conservative managers. How much did partisanship affect pay? Men received about $5,000, on average, more in annual bonuses than women did.
Source: hbr.org (Dec. 2, 2016).
