The ACC Docket, April 2011 at 14, states a finding from the 2010 Managing Outside Counsel Survey: “The median number of US law firms used by law departments during 2009 was 12.” A dozen seems too low. If a law departments has a couple of law suits during the year,…
Who, exactly, completes benchmark surveys? I looked at the positions of the first 215 respondents to my General Counsel Metrics benchmark survey. 131 of them (65%) are general counsel. Another 30 (14%) are law department administrators and about the same number are direct reports to the General Counsel. In other…
A co-panelist with me recently mentioned that her law department regularly compares its fully-loaded hourly billing rate for lawyers with the average rate charged by outside counsel. The comparison has a fair amount of validity, but some faults can mar the match (See my post of June 29, 2009: insurance…
Aficionado that I am of metrics, I started slicing and dicing the revenue figures from the 215 law departments that have submitted data so far to the GCM global benchmark survey. Those companies reported $2.4 trillion of combined corporate revenue for 2010. (For those reporting in Euros, British Pounds and…
General counsel hold their settlement data close to their vest. They fear repercussions in litigation if those amounts or terms leak out. Therefore, those who want to collect data on corporate settlements for benchmark purposes should dispense with direct inquiries yet try oblique ones. Surveys could ask for the average…
In-house attorneys around the world work varying numbers of hours each year, at least if you give credence to the combined effect of paid leave and paid public holidays mandated in each country. Consider one flagrant contrast summarized by Eduardo Porter, The Price of Everything: Solving the mystery of why…
For several reasons surveys don’t collect data on settlements paid by corporations. Often those amounts are kept confidential, and few within the defendant company know them. Other times settlement funds come from business units, sometimes more than one, and it may be difficult for the law department to assemble those…
A simple formula allows you to calculate the number of relevant documents missed by reviewers, or the precedent cases missed by researchers, or the improper expense records submitted on invoices, or the number of typos in a brief. Curious? As explained in John D. Barrow, 100 Essential Things You Didn’t…
On Monday my column appeared on InsideCounsel.com regarding three uses of metrics. Grandly, the uses are analysis, explanation and persuasion, the latter also known as rhetoric. It is useful to understand these powers inherent in credible numbers used skillfully. If you would like to find out more about this topic,…
My speculation is that the degree of competition in an industry strongly determines the industry’s legal intensity. Benchmarks such as those on personnel and dollars per unit of revenue will vary between industries because of greater or legal competition. You can measure competition by the number of firms (both public…