The National Law Journal, in its June 11th issue, published my article on four developments that will enhance benchmark reports in the near future. This article won the BigLaw Pick of the Week in the July 26, 2011 issue. BigLaw is a free weekly email newsletter that provides helpful information…
Benchmark reports typically sort participants into recognized broad industries such as manufacturing, high tech, and pharmaceutical. Several times I have taken a swing at these traditional industry classifications because they have flaws or miss factors that might distinguish law departments more usefully. One post alone discusses six attributes that significantly…
The Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) has expanded to “more than 28,000 members (in 10,000 companies).” That statement from Corporate Counsel’s August issue tells us its membership averages 2.8 lawyers per member department, a calculation that does not support any estimate of the average or median number of lawyers per…
An article gave some data on the number of U.S. mobile patents 11 major players in that market have applied for and have been granted. Bloomberg Businessweek, Aug. 8-14, 2011 at 37, shows a chart with data provided by MDB Capital. I eyeballed the numbers for the likes of Research…
John Lukacs, The Future of History (Yale 2011) at 43-44, disparages what he calls “quanto-history,” the effort to gather data and apply statistical tools in the service of historical knowledge. What others have called “Cliometrics” – Clio being the goddess of history – lack reliable data and, worse, focus on…
We make the estimate by multiplying lawyers per billion dollars of market value against the world-wide total of market capitalization and then dividing by the average number of lawyers in law departments. Perhaps the result is directionally correct. From four posts on this blog, let’s loosely estimate lawyers per billion…
Larger law departments, those with say fifteen or more lawyers, tend to be in companies with equivalently more revenue. Since economies of scale in legal spending benefit those larger departments, surveys whose participants are skewed toward large companies will produce distorted, lower benchmarks (See my post of Dec. 16, 2010:…
“With some exceptions, any average of a large number of similar terms will have a normal, bell-shaped distribution.” This powerful statistical discovery by Pierre Laplace in 1810 as described by Sharon Bertsch McGrayne, The Theory That Would Not Die (Yale Univ. 2011) at 6, means that if a law department…
The greater a company’s revenue, the less it spends on legal expenses in proportion to that revenue. Despite having amassed 15 possible explanations for that pattern, another one came recently to my attention (See my post of Aug. 21, 2008: client satisfaction or what leads to it, invention activity within…
A report a few years ago had data for a group of law departments about “the largest expense item incurred by” the participants. The median figure for that big ticket item was fairly consistently about eight percent of the total legal spending of the departments, whether you looked the participants…