Sometimes, it is absolutely necessary for clients to use multiple law firms for a single matter. For instance, if a client wants their usual counsel to appear in a lawsuit in a jurisdiction where their typical counsel is not licensed to practice, they may also need to engage local counsel. In addition, sometimes a matter might require litigation and ancillary proceedings that cannot be handled by a single firm. However, when clients use multiple law firms for the same matter, certain inefficiencies may arise that can be avoided if the client uses just one law firm to handle the legal work.
When I was a Biglaw associate, I worked on a large litigation matter on behalf of one of our clients. I was perplexed to discover that the client had hired both our firm and another large law firm to represent them in this matter. I still am not sure why the client decided to go with two law firms to handle this lawsuit. Perhaps the client believed the lawsuit was too large for just one law firm? This did not seem reasonable since both firms had hundreds of attorneys each. I suspect that some kind of internal politics compelled the hiring of two law firms — perhaps to please different factions of the client’s legal department.
In any case, working on a matter with a different law firm created administrative challenges. Firstly, the other law firm and our law firm needed to spend significant time deciding who would handle various tasks related to the lawsuit and conveying information that was discovered by one law firm that might not have been learned by the other. In addition, since the client wanted both firms to sign off on significant parts of the representation, we would review the other firm’s work, and they would review our work, which likely added to the fees billed. This might have enhanced the work product, but it is unclear if this was worth the increased legal fees.
Other inefficiencies were created since our firm tried at every step of the process to show that we were doing a better job than the other firm or that the other firm had made mistakes in the tasks it was assigned to handle. Partners at our firm likely wanted to put themselves in a better position to receive additional work from this client, so they tried to undermine the other shop at every turn. I remember I once drafted a memo specifically outlining mistakes that the other firm had made on a particular project so that the partner could use this as ammunition when communicating about the deficiencies of the other shop. I cannot be entirely sure, but I have to believe that attorneys at the other firm were doing everything they could to undermine our firm so that they too could better position themselves to receive additional work from the client.
In many instances, two heads are better than one, and clients tend to get better work product if more attorneys are reviewing papers and conducting research on behalf of the client. However, clients should not create inefficiencies in a representation by providing incentives that give lawyers a reason to expend time and resources on anything else than best serving a client. Accordingly, it rarely makes sense to hire two law firms to handle the same matter on behalf of a client. In most situations, a client will be best served by hiring one law firm to handle an entire legal matter so that clients do not need to deal with the administrative issues associated with multiple law firms handling one matter.
Jordan Rothman is a partner of The Rothman Law Firm, a full-service New York and New Jersey law firm. He is also the founder of Student Debt Diaries, a website discussing how he paid off his student loans. You can reach Jordan through email at jordan@rothman.law.
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