Jun 22 2009 Posted by

If money is tight for your firm in this economy as it is for most businesses right now, then you should probably give some thought to renegotiating your relationships with outside vendors.

I wrote about how companies should consider renegotiating their vendor contracts in a blogposting for my Silicon Valley IP Licensing Law Blog. In that posting, I was talking about non-lawyer businesses, but the truth of the matter is that we as lawyers should follow our own advice and look at where we are spending our money in this economy, too.  

If your firm is like most businesses, you likely have relationships at the very least with one or more telephone companies, a cable company, one or more independent contractors, web host providers, and a few insurance companies.  Have you taken another look at those relationships and looked at whether you can reduce any of your costs?  

We as lawyers sometimes get so focused on advising our clients and helping them with their legal issues that we sometimes forget to manage our own.  However, start-up law firms have financial pressures just like our clients do, and we lawyers need to focus on reducing our monthly costs in this economy just like our clients are doing.

So, if you have not pulled out your cable service contract lately, or looked at your monthly telephone bill and priced out your alternatives or called the service provider to negotiate a reduction, now may be the ideal time to do so.  Set aside some time this week to look at your law firm budget and see where you can make some cuts.