Do Inside Counsel Throw Time Away Policing Outside Counsel?
How much is time worth? Not from a hourly billing rate perspective, but from the perspective of the value of what can be accomplished? If you are an inside counsel, do you have extra time? Do you have the luxury of being able to throw time away? Few, if any, do.
With that truism as prologue, we come to the issue of time spent reviewing bills of outside counsel. Is there a more distasteful, annoying task on the plates of inside counsel?
I have the obligation of reviewing outside counsel invoices on matters where I act as national counsel, so I have seen an awful lot of ...., how do we say it, .... creativity. Yeah, creativity. I can only 
imagine what others have seen. This is one of the great hidden costs of the hourly billing system. What can I get away with vs. what can I catch. Hard to think of anything less worthy of the time of inside counsel. Certainly, its not the highest and best use of inside counsel's time.
Rees Morrison, who writes the Law Department Management blog, has an interesting post that questions the conventional wisdom that fixed fee agreements generate real savings of in-house counsel time. While not drawing any conclusion, Rees tries to quantify the value saved by multiplying the hours saved times an estimated hourly cost of inside counsel's time. From my vantage point, this analysis falls victim to the classic criticism of hourly rates that the value assigned to an hour is arbitrary, and that while the value of outside counsel's time is often overstated, the figure assigned to inside counsel's time seems to be a cost figure rather than a value figure.
Inside counsel provide the greatest value to their company when their focus is on significant business issues, or matters of great importance. Bill review just doesn't seem to fall into those categories, regardless of the presence or absence of statistical proof.