Abstract
The research discussed below was not originated with the intention of examining the impact of fee shifting; rather, the research was planned as a small-scale follow up to some of the work I did with the Civil Litigation Research Project (CLRP).' One of the interesting things that emerged from my work on CLRP was the significant changes that are occurring in the ways that large corporations purchase legal services. Specifically, corporations are trying to rationalize, in a business sense, the way they use lawyers.2 These efforts are apparent in two separate movements: the shift toward greater reliance upon inside legal staffs, and the increase in the level of monitoring and control that corporations seek to exercise over outside legal counsel. These observations, which arose primarily from informal contacts with corporations during the researching rather than from the formal interviews that were conducted, led to speculation that the movement toward greater control, which primarily reflected a concern about costs, was in large part due to the lack of any kind of formal controls in the United States on what lawyers charge for their services. I speculated that in a system in which there were formal cost-control or cost-review mechanisms, there might be substantially less concern about legal costs, and as a result, less movement toward the use of inside lawyers or toward close monitoring of outside law firms. The logical place to conduct a comparative inquiry of the type suggested by my hypothesis was either England or Canada, since both countries (excluding the
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