When a law department retains a law firm to handle a large matter or a series of matters, the law department should make sure the law firm selects a core team. The core team should consist of the fewest associates, paralegals and partners necessary to get most of the work done competently and timely. For smaller cases or matters, the core team might be as small as a partner and an associate. For larger matters or a number of matters over a period of time, a core team might expand to as many as six or eight lawyers and paraprofessionals.
With a core team, a law department can reasonably expect 70 percent or more of the work on the matter done by the team members. What the core team is designed to lessen is associate churn, where a number of associates come in, bill some amount of time on the matter, and then disappear. The law department might go further to curtail in-and-out billing and say that no one else can charge time to the matter without the prior permission of the lawyer in the law department who is responsible for it. As an inducement, the law department might allow the firm to charge it for some amount of intra-team meetings or group development activities. After all, the core team should be the repository of institutional knowledge about the client and its matters.
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