The Gap to Fellow Corporate Counsel: “Use Contract Attorneys”

As noted by Rees Morrison in his blog Law Department Management (click here),  the December 2008 issue of the ACC Digest (the magazine of the Association of Corporate Counsel) reports on the ACC Annual Meeting where Michelle Banks, the general counsel of The Gap, told an in-house counsel cost-management panel to “use contract attorneys”.

We have read the article (we receive the Digest as a member of the ACC) and her comments are summarized as follows:

— The Gap is “asking its outside firms to provide staffing plans and budgets and increasingly holding them to it.”  

 —  Banks mentions her version of the “Manhattan Project” (see notes below): the abandonment of large firms and their replacement by mid-size or smaller firms. 

—  The Gap tries to be more selective about whether to use any law firm at all or do the work in-house.

—  The Gap law department will now “use contract attorneys on an increasing basis”

—   But even The Gap “has outsourced some of our work to India, which is growing in popularity.” 

Morrison’s blog has cited a number of examples of contract or temporary lawyers used in-house in the past:  Dial Corporation, Purdue Pharma, Sears, etc. (click here)

We have also seen an uptick in posts on The Posse List by in-house legal departments.

NOTE:  the phrase “Manhattan project” references GE’s law department when they changed the rules of the game about 20 years ago by ditching BigLaw as the “only” place to go for legal work and moving to regional or smaller law firms for a large amount of legal work.  Quoting Reece Morrison “the evocative phrase has come to stand for the notion of equivalent capability, for less”.   The use of “Manhattan Project” is a punning reference to the original atomic bomb project, the idea being to “blow up” the big firms and find
good, less expensive, smaller ones.