Whatever happened to procurement and law?

One thing you quickly learn from writing about business - the corporate world, much as it likes to pretend that commerce is a frightfully complicated but essentially scientific and logical process, actually does a lot of stuff because of fashion. Call it group-think, fad or collective adoption of dumb jargon - many trends happen in various industries largely because they become the received wisdom of the day.

This thought occurred recently reading an article by The American Lawyer's Aric Press, which recounts a recent industry debate during which one frustrated general counsel threatened to "let those animals at some of our service providers". The animals in question are the procurement teams that large companies routinely roll out for various kinds of, well, procurement. But not law. As Aric recounts, even the suggestion in the debate led one law firm leader to ruefully respond: "Thank God I'm old."

But whatever happened to the concept of large companies using procurement teams for legal services? It was happening tentatively a few years back and then, as far as I know, it all went quiet. Given that the global economy is hardly booming, even if it has plainly improved considerably since the first half of 2009, that is odd.

Yes, clients are increasingly pressing for ground on billing from advisers - in some cases successfully, though less so generally than some suppose. But procurement still seems nowhere on the agenda. Instead, there's much talk of re-engineering the model and legal process outsourcing. All perfectly valid things to examine, but you can't help wondering how much of the current enthusiasm for outsourcing is to do with rigorous economic analysis and how much is due to it being the current fad.

Personally, if I was a client needing to cut back legal spending I would be working to tighten up procurement before I tried to refashion the legal services model, which seems quite a lot of hassle when I just want fees to come down a bit. Put another way, I would want to really crack walking before I tried running.

Presumably part of the issue is that legal teams are generally uncomfortable with procurement professionals and certainly there are horror stories about some cack-handed early attempts to apply the model to law. Still, it's surprising that this has been enough to keep it off the agenda.

That's not to suggest that procurement is a miracle method for making law firms more client-focused and efficient. It does seem that there are some relatively simple steps that could make law firms better suited for a post-recession period of austerity, but the current fashion seems to be go for the complex answer first.

And while I'm on the subject of weirdly-discarded ideas - where are all those boilerplate documents law firms were supposed to be working on years ago?

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