Unhappy with your lawyer?  You're not alone.  Most of America's largest companies ousted at least one of their outside counsel in the last 18 months, and only a third like their primary law firm well enough to recommend it to someone else, a recent survey shows.

And with attorney fees spiraling to heart-stopping new heights-corporate legal bills have nearly doubled in the last five years and law firms now pay just-out-of-school associates $160,000 a year-corporate America's bile-spitting may only get worse.

"Are people dissatisfied and firing their law firms more often than they used to? You betcha," said Susan Hackett, general counsel of Association of Corporate Counsel, whose membership represents 8,000 companies, including all of the Fortune 100. "You hear people gripe about the cost of legal services, how they gouge clients and are out of touch."

Among America's largest companies, 61 percent replaced one of their main law firms in the previous 18 months, up from 54 percent the year before, according to a 2007 report by BTI Consulting Group. The study, based on telephone interviews with top legal officers at 250 Fortune 1000 companies, also provided a forum for malcontents to vent.

"I hate it when I have to keep calling them for updated information or progress reports," the acting counsel for a software developer told the survey.

An associate general counsel at a Global 500 company fumed: "It drives me crazy when they take the attitude that they're more important. They express this by being patronizing, unresponsive. . . ."

Michael Rynowecer, president of BTI Consulting, says he has heard about "law firms providing a budget of X and then billing at five times X-which will just absolutely send clients through the roof."

The current controversy over new-associate pay "just adds fuel to the fire," says Rynowecer, whose report also advises law firms on how to improve relations.

Other research corroborates the sour mood within corporate legal departments. Last October, at the Association of Corporate Counsel's annual meeting in San Diego, about 850 attendees were asked: "Have you fired any of your law firms this year?" Pondering the question about a 10-month time frame, about a third of the chief legal officers said yes-and cited costs, poor communications, and poor quality of work as the main reasons.

In a separate study co-published last year by the Association of Corporate Counsel and Serengeti Law, a company that provides law firm billing and financial management services to in-house counsel, 56 percent of companies said in a mail survey that they had "terminated relationships with at least some of their law firms," compared to about 45 percent in years past.