General counsel deserve to have good, reliable, and useful benchmark figures. Many people try to supply that need. All of them face some systemic unknowns about the representativeness of the law departments that participate in their surveys. Centralized departments: For example, data may be less common from decentralized legal functions…
Return on investment, the calculations that justify spending money, figure prominently in decisions by law department managers – or they ought to. Being so important, many posts on this blog aim directly at ROI or refer to it and it has become time for me to invest in updating my…
Metrics and benchmarks provide opportunities for sleight of hand, for tricks that fool some people, for willful ambiguities, and for dumb decisions. Here are eight candidates for booby prizes other than samples that are not representative and questions that are not neutral. Frame the findings with “save up to” or…
People in legal departments who want to make sense out of the large volume of data generated by their various software programs, notably their matter management system, have several choices for how to dig through and make sense of that data. Open source software called Hadoop lets users sift through…
An announcement about the changing of the guard at the Association of Corporate Counsel mentioned that during one person’s tenure large law department memberships had increased 89 percent. Wow, impressive! Wait! We don’t actually know whether that is impressive. The release did not state the time period or the starting…
Courtesy of Aspen, publisher of the two-volume directory of more than 30,000 in-house lawyers at some 8,000 corporations and nonprofit organizations, your law department can get the 2010 directory on CD-ROM. This year’s edition (2011) has more than 2,800 pages and retails for $1,495. For questions about the directory, write…
To get Release 3.0 in late September and its benchmark metrics for your industry based on 500+ companies, all at no cost, click here to take the General Counsel Metrics global benchmark survey. As of this morning, 383 law departments have submitted their six pieces of staffing and spending data.…
Academics conduct research that makes me envious. Consider a detailed study of contracts described in the Acad. Mgt. Rev., Feb. 2011 at 182. Three professors studied 385 contracts Compustar had entered into with buyers of its IT services. (Of interest to me was the statement that lawyers negotiated none of…
If there were an accepted rate to convert the number of a law departments paralegals to lawyer equivalents, such as three paralegals will be deemed to equal one lawyer, and similarly to convert support staff to lawyer equivalents, what would that conversion tell us as a benchmark? First, though, although…
The law departments of large and acclaimed companies sit square in the targets of most benchmark surveys. Perhaps we should call them the Unfortunate 500, deluged as they are with requests for benchmark participation. All survey sponsors want name brand respondents. Bigger is better; better known is better. Particularly when…