As of today, more than 430 legal departments have submitted data (you can click on the upper right hand ad to do so at no charge). Of them, 314 have provided complete data, so I thought I would share some totals to date.
This early set of participants reported 9,887 lawyers and 7,410 other legal staff, so lawyers make up about 57 percent of their total legal staff. The median department had nine lawyers. The total internal spend last year of these departments exceeded $3.3 billion, which was less than what they spent on external counsel, $5.8 billion. The staggering revenue total was $2.3 trillion dollars.
As to some other measures, 155 of the departments (49%) reported internal budgets of more than $2 million, 149 reported external spend of more than $3 million, and a whopping 96 of them are as large as or larger than the smallest Fortune 500 company ($4.6 billion). With the largest industry (23%) being manufacturers, slightly more than half of all the companies are headquartered outside the United States.
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