The well-done General Counsel Benchmarking Report for 2009 of Otto Henning & Co. at 64 provides data on the number of lawyers (Rechtsanwälte weltweit) worldwide its benchmark survey participants reported. From the 56 companies in the survey, all from the German Fortune 150, the overall average was 3.5 lawyers per…
A report based on 2008 data from 56 of the 150 largest German companies produced benchmark averages for paralegals (Rechtsanwaltsgehilfen) and admins (Sekretariatskräfte und weiter Assistenzkräfte) per in-house lawyer. Those departments averaged 0.2 paralegals per lawyer, i.e., five lawyers for every paralegal. US law departments show more leverage, on the…
An earlier post referred to defense costs paid on behalf of an in-house counsel (See my post of Jan. 18, 2011: GlaxoSmithkline lawyer’s defense paid for.). What are the odds that legal defense costs on behalf of an employee lawyer make their way into calculations of fully loaded costs per…
Earlier I explained how to calculate and use statistical variance (See my post of Feb. 18, 2011: variance in statistics.). I used as an example patent applications handled by a group of law firms. To solve the problem that variance figures aren’t natural, they are squared, statisticians compute the square…
If you are from a Fortune 500-size company (more than $4 billion in revenue) and you complete the current survey through the notice top right on this blog or use this URL, I will send you the full analysis of the 95 law departments from Fortune 500 companies last year.…
Beyond averages and medians, general counsel should understand statistical ways to describe the variability and distribution of data. One uses the statistical term called variance. Let’s say you use ten law firms to prepare and prosecute patents. You know how many patent applications they each handled during 2010. It’s easy…
Consulting to a law department that does not know how much business units spend on outside counsel or how many lawyers practice law inside the company – both afflictions due to the decentralized operating style of the company, I realized that the available benchmarks for legal departments may be slightly…
Everyone is comfortable with the trade’s definitions of broad industries: manufacturing, insurance, aerospace and the like. All well and good for many purposes, not so good for legal department comprehension. We may need a breakdown of companies that reflects more accurately the intensity of their legal exposure. For example, if…
Starting with data from 39 large US and Canadian manufacturing companies that participated in the General Counsel Metrics benchmark survey in 2010, I took their market capitalization and divided it by their number of in-house lawyers. At the median, those companies had about one-quarter billion dollars of market cap per…
A recent study presents data on the distribution of companies by industry in the Fortune 200. It is the Litigation Cost Survey of Major Companies, presented at the Searle Center on Law, Regulation, and Economic Growth, (Northwestern School of Law, May 10-11, 2010) at 7. For this post, I organized…