Steven A. Lauer advises SKJ and its clients on outsourcing and legal support service restructuring. He consults with law departments and law firms on the value of legal service to help law department clients to maximize the value of their legal service teams and to achieve the greatest possible return on their investments in both internal and external resources.

Mr. Lauer has over fifteen years’ experience as an in-house counsel in law departments ranging from two to over 300 attorneys and as the sole in-house attorney and General Counsel for an organization.  For six previous years, he was in private practice.  For over two years, Mr. Lauer was Executive Vice President, Deputy Editor and Publisher of The Metropolitan Corporate Counsel, a monthly journal for in-house lawyers that focuses on issues associated with the relationship between in-house and outside counsel.  He served for years as Vice Chair of the Corporate Counsel Committee and co-Chair of the Corporate Compliance Committee of the ABA Section of Business Law.

From April 1989 until May 1997, he was an Assistant General Counsel for The Prudential Insurance Company of America, during the last 15 months of which he was Project Director for the Prudential Law Department’s Outside Counsel Utilization Task Force.  As such, he designed and managed the preparation and distribution of 109 RFPs by which Prudential restructured its purchase of legal services and the evaluation of hundreds of proposals submitted by over 130 firms to handle that work, which was awarded to 80 firms.  As the in-house environmental attorney for the company’s commercial real estate units, he organized a team of environmental litigation counsel to handle environmental litigation for the Real Estate Section’s clients and developed other litigation-management tools, including a litigation-policies-and-procedures manual, a case-evaluation protocol and other procedures.

He has written extensively on the delivery and value of legal service to corporate clients, compliance and other issues of concern to corporations and is a frequent speaker on such topics as compliance, partnering, litigation management, alternative fee arrangements, task-based billing, case management and other topics.  He has written four books on those issues:  Managing Your Relationship With External Counsel (2010), The Value-Able Law Department (2011), and Value-Related Fee Arrangements (2012), all published by the Ark Group, and, with a co-author, The Value-Able Law Firm (2018). published by the American Bar Association.  He has spoken at ABA and ACC seminars, the Litigation Management Institute, the Environmental Corporate Counsel Institute, the annual meeting of the Association of Life Insurance Counsel, LegalTech Europe, the International Law Congress, the LawPartnering Forum and other conferences.  He can be reached by e-mail at slauer@carolina.rr.com or by phone at (973) 207-3741 (cell) or through his website at http://thevalue-ablelawyer.com/.