Georgetown Law Alumni Magazine - Res Ipsa Loquitur
Spring/Summer 2009 - Online Volume 1
Lectures and Events
David Wilkins on the Attorney-Client Relationship
By late September — when Bank of America sought to buy Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and record stock market plunges were becoming daily realities — no one needed an expert to know that the relationship between law firms and their corporate clients was going to change too. Still, the nature of this new relationship, then as now, is not so predictable. If large firms work for a few existing corporate clients instead of courting new ones, how does that affect things like attorney hiring, training, turnover and ethics? And if corporate clients in turn are reducing the number of law firms they work with, what are these companies demanding from their chosen few?
David B. Wilkins, Harvard Law School’s Kirkland and Ellis Professor of Law and director of two programs on the legal profession, was on hand September 24 to discuss issues like these in the 29th annual Thomas F. Ryan Lecture at Georgetown Law. In his speech, “From Agents to Partners: Toward a New Model of the Corporate Attorney-Client Relationship,” Wilkins explored how corporations and the law firms they employ have moved from a principal/agent relationship to a model that more closely resembles a joint venture or partnership. And these relationships, he said, are becoming increasingly more important in today’s world.
“Corporations are consuming more and more of the total amount of legal services being provided,” he said, noting that this amount has increased by almost 50 percent since 1975. And as corporate clients become more sophisticated, they are also investing a significant amount of their resources in-house — resulting in the fastest growing sector of the legal profession. Even where outside counsel is retained, those lawyers may still spend large amounts of time in the office of the general counsel of the client corporation, Wilkins said.
“The bottom line is this: relationships are getting deeper, and the clients are looking for different things from the law firms than they had traditionally looked for,” Wilkins said. “They’re not just looking for legal expertise. They’re looking for knowledge of their business.” And as business partners, corporations also want law firms to share the risks as well as the benefits. “It’s not a marriage,” Wilkins said, noting that the parties, in some sense, act as competitors, with each threatening to take its business elsewhere if things don’t go well.
Still, breakups are rare. Corporate clients may still fire their lawyers, but since the parties have so much invested in each other, Wilkins said, they’re not likely to throw in the towel. “Clients fire law firms much less frequently than people think,” he said. “As one general counsel said, it’s a little like turning the Titanic.”
