Does Corporate Legal Hire Lawyers or Law Firms?

What is the most important factor to corporate legal in evaluating outside counsel? 

Relationships according to a survey of corporate legal departments published at the end of 2014. The vast majority of respondents were corporate attorneys with senior leadership titles.

If relationships still matter in the business of law, what then does that really mean from a corporate counsel perspective?

Casey Sullivan, of the newly launched Bloomberg publication, Big Law Business site provides an excellent example in a recent story: Newegg CLO: Lawyers Matter, Law Firms Don’t.

It provides the reaction from a chief legal officer who learned “secondhand” that one of his key outside litigation attorneys made a lateral move to another firm and “wasn’t fazed.”

“My philosophy and the philosophy of a growing number of in-house counsel, is that we hire lawyers, not law firms,” remarked Lee Cheng, CLO with Newegg, Inc. “As long as they demonstrate the same level of care, we are platform agnostic.”

How do lawyers in get to that point?  Mr. Cheng noted:

Yar [Chaikovsky] reached out to me initially many years ago. I get a lot of calls from a lot of lawyers pitching for work. There is definitely a difference between calls, and calls. We had a conversation that I found engaging and he demonstrated in that conversation that he understood the in-house mentality. That stood out. This is not clear with a lot of lawyers who have only worked at a big law firm. So I had a very good initial conversation.

Despite already having “very good patent counsel” he sent a small matter was satisfied with the results so he sent a little more work over.  The relationship grew from there.

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