More directly useful for containing costs however are sixty day or ninety day budgets. It is in these budgets that you and your lawyers should be able to nail down anticipated costs with a reasonable degree of certainty. Although like any other major project, litigation is somewhat unpredictable, you and your lawyers should be able to look at least sixty to ninety days ahead and come up with both a litigation strategy and a detailed litigation budget you can stick to for the short term. As in any major undertaking, unexpected events will occasionally require adjusting the budget, but if you want to get control of your litigation costs you need to have a detailed working budget for each case and strive to make any changes the exception rather than the rule. Regularly B e careful.
Most lawyers suffer from budgetary amnesia.
While we may grudgingly agree to litigation budgets at the beginning of a case, we quickly forget them once we get into the fray. Unless you actively monitor where you stand each month with respect to your agreed upon budgets, you will find that your law firm will quickly begin to disregard them. You may want to follow the example of Barbara Wall, in-house counsel for the USA Today publisher Gannett, who insists that, as the first page of every bill submitted, Gannett's outside counsel attach a one page report showing clearly where the actual billing on each matter stands with respect to the budget. This one simple step accomplishes two important things at once. First, it puts the most critical information in the bill right on top where it belongs, and second, according to Barbara Wall, the simple fact that her lawyers know that they are going to have to submit the report with every bill is a powerful motivator for keeping billings in line with the litigation budgets from the start.