About


Liz Harris

Liz Harris is a lawyer with a background as a litigator specialising in disputes between lawyers and their clients. In this specialist practice, she has reviewed thousands of files and seen the way hundreds of lawyers manage legal work, developing insights into what works well, how costs blow out, and what are the best practices in managing work and therefore legal costs.

Liz consults to government and corporate legal departments on best practices in legal department management. A main focus is legal spend management, utilising legal project management principles and developing clients as Informed Purchasers of legal services. She regularly presents workshops on legal spend management and legal project management in Australia, the UK and the USA.

She is often engaged as an expert witness on legal cost and litigation management issues, including in class actions, and complex commercial litigation.

Previous Projects

Some of previous projects:

  • Assisting in cost management in some of the largest litigation in Australia, including the Victorian Black Saturday Bushfires class actions

  • Advised Australian State Governments on procurement of legal services, and establishment of whole of government legal panels, and provided Informed Purchaser training to government clients.  

  • Worked the NSW Attorney-General's Department in development of its Informed Purchaser workbook and delivered training as part of that platform.  

  • Developed fixed fee pricing models for insurers and other commercial clients particular portfolios of work, in addition to undertaking regular audits of panel firm performance against Service Level Agreements.

  • Worked with law firms, to develop fixed fee pricing arrangement in a variety of practice areas, including insurance, personal injury work, commercial work, planning, and family law.

  • Consulting on resource matching of legal department

  • Review of panel arrangements

  • Scoping fixed fee pricing in particular areas of work

  • Negotiating Value pricing arrangements

  • Establishing benchmarks for use in value pricing arrangements

  • Monitoring performance against billing guidelines

  • Providing advice on RFPs (including acting as procurement officer on tenders)

  • Project Management of large scale litigation