The Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) is an in-house bar association for professional corporate counsel who practice in legal departments globally.  ACC has published a 2010 “Value-Based Fee Primer,” available for reading at http://www.acc.com/valuechallenge/index.cfm, that has some interesting fee rate statistics and alternative arrangements for retaining outside counsel other than traditional “by the hour” retentions.  Here are the interesting trends:

• Non-hourly fee billing arrangements by corporate legal departments comprised 43% of surveyed departments in 2009, up from 27% of departments doing so in 2008;
• Alternative fee arrangements in law departments totaled $13.1 billion in 2009 versus $8.6 billion in 2008;
• Savings from alternative billing arrangements ranged from 15% to over 30%;
• Over the past 10 years, overall costs to U.S. companies rose 20% while legal costs rose 75% with U.S. law firms actually increasing hourly billing rates during the 2009 great recession and 90% of law firm respondents saying they would increase rates in 2010.