Hiring Outside Counsel

I’ve been asked by my team when I recommend for us to engage outside counsel. I have a bias to handle as much as possible with our in-house staff. That said, there are times when the novelty, complexity or importance of an issue merits engaging special expertise. As a general rule of thumb, I will engage outside counsel when we need certain skills, scale, access or coverage that the in-house department can’t supply.

Skill- While I cultivate attorneys who are experts in certain areas of the law, no law department, certainly not a small one, can be expert in all areas. Just as with medical specialists, so it is with lawyers, sometimes you simply need a world class opinion on an unfamiliar topic. Keep these experts in your Rolodex (do I date myself? perhaps your email list), their knowledge is worth the cost.

Scale- We also reach out for outside counsel to ease resource constraints during peak demand periods. This resource smoothing can be achieved through a combination of paralegals, temps, contract attorneys, and the occasional secondment. But there are times when, as Stalin said, “quantity has a quality all its own,” and you will need to hire a firm that has enough personpower to send squadrons of resources “over the top,” perhaps in response to a regulatory audit, a civil investigation or a sizable litigation.

Access-Sometimes you need to pay for “access.” By that I mean you may have a need to hire the former Attorney General or other influential figure when you categorically need to be taken seriously by whatever constituency you need to persuade.

Coverage- Outside counsel can adopt an independent view that can make unpopular decisions more palatable and also can offer an ostensibly neutral sounding board against which to test new ideas. This is a valuable role that often cannot be performed by in-house staff who may be caught up in the context of company culture.

I’d be curious if readers have any other criteria for when to hire outside counsel.