As a typical application, the Lenstra-Lenstra-Lovász lattice basis reduction algorithm (LLL) is used to compute a reduced basis of the orthogonal lattice for a given integer matrix, via reducing a special kind of lattice bases. With such bases in input, we propose a new technique for bounding from above the number of iterations required by the LLL algorithm. The main technical ingredient is a variant of the classical LLL potential, which could prove useful to understand the behavior of LLL for other families of input bases.