Do you litigate? Hiring a new attorney to show up day of trial only communicates to the other side that it's clown-city.

>On staff legal council is there to be able to make the call when a more expensive firm should be hired and brought in. There's a lot of BS lawsuits, however, that flow through. For example, every software company that gets big enough will likely get sued for some BS patent infringement. Having on staff legal will be able to make the call of "yeah, you should just give them $10k to go away". That's a lot cheaper than hiring a firm to come in and then tell you "Yeah, you should give them $10k to go away".

Do you litigate? Do you know what's involved to actually get to a trial? Let alone the day of trial? In house is going to take depositions and brief summary judgment? In house is going to prepare the pre trial order? Get proposed jury instructions? Again, do you litigate?

>Particularly for a business, it takes years before any case gets close to going to trial. Plenty of time for your council to make the determination on when bigger guns should be brought in.

You said, in particular, "up until the point where you start a trial."