Long gone are the days when going in-house was likened to putting on a nice comfortable pair of slippers.

These days, general counsel enjoy a high status as the demanding keepers of their company’s legal purse strings. They want more for their money, and they are getting ever-better at wielding their power to make sure they get it.Fixed fees and rigorous panel tender processes may initially have been resisted by the profession, but they are now the norm. E-billing, whereby clients can see precisely how much individual fee-earners have billed on a file at any point in time, was once thought of as cutting edge but is now pretty mainstream.

That said, new ideas to squeeze more value from private practice firms are still cropping up fairly frequently. Take BUPA general counsel Paul Newton’s recent e-auction as part of its panel review, for example. Newton encouraged firms to bid against each other by making the billing rates they were putting forward visible to other bidders. A novel idea with the aim of cutting 30% off BUPA’s legal spend.

So perhaps in this current climate, private practice lawyers should be a little nervous about the creation of a new group Global Leaders in Law, which is exclusively for general counsel. As in any group of in-house lawyers where there are no external solicitors present, the in-housers will no doubt be free and frank in exchanging any horror stories of poor service and overcharging which they may have experienced at the hands of their private practice colleagues.

But more than that, it will be a forum for ‘creating new thinking’, with a thinktank led by the high-profile Deepak Malhotra, a former Commerce & Industry Group chairman who is currently general counsel at Constellation Europe. While the group will be largely focused on strengthening the positive role of general counsel, I would be surprised if new strategies for getting the most out of law firms did not also feature on the agenda. The group’s first report, on ‘the value of commercial legal services’, could be an interesting read for both sides of commercial practice.