In a Q&A from Bloomberg Law, Honeywell senior vice president and general counsel Anne Madden talks about the company’s reduction of its panel of outside law firms from 100 to 13. The following has been edited for length and style.
“A few years ago, in the United States, we embarked upon what we call ‘Project Zipcode.’ We found that if we could avoid always going to a big New York City white shoe law firm – or a big L.A. law firm, or big San Francisco law firm, or big Chicago law firm – and we went deeper into the country into, quote-unquote, different ZIP codes, we found that we could get super-high-quality work from our outside counsel at a significantly reduced spend. We use alternative legal service providers for very repetitive, more commoditized work. For the strategic partner panel, what we’re trying to do is find a fit with one of our strategic partner panel firms for all new matters that require a specialty. And we will continue to leverage our close relationships with the more elite, New York white shoe firms. Those relationships are incredibly important to us, and those will always continue to exist, but our commitment to our panel firms is to give all new matters that emerge to our strategic panel firms in the U.S. and that only by operation of exception will we assign a matter to a non-panel firm.”
Published October 9, 2020.
