Foolish me. Here I naively thought that excellent empirical data on what law firms charge for patent-related services would help inside IP lawyers. Wrong (See my post of Oct. 14, 2010: AIPLA’s historical data “gives legal departments an enormous advantage”.)! Having singled out the AIPLA data I praised, the author…
The scope of this topic extends far beyond this meager post, by any account. Still, having put together thoughts in various posts about how to squeeze insights from benchmark data it behooves me to assemble, them starting at my 5,000th post (See my post of Feb. 10, 2010: visual analytics;…
Richard H. Weise, Representing the Corporate Client: Designs for Quality (Prentice Hall 1991), Chapter 3, describes a benchmark survey conducted in 1989 by Motorola. It gathered data from about 80 US companies. Quite interesting to me is its data on “Ratio of Total Legal Budget to Total Sales Amount.” One…
Some fundamental benchmark ratios have stayed fairly stable for many years. Richard H. Weise, Representing the Corporate Client: Designs for Quality (Prentice Hall 1991), Chapter 3, describes a benchmark survey conducted in 1989 that gathered data from about 80 US companies. Roughly one-fifth of them had revenues greater than $9…
As I did with countries, so I analyzed 702 participants of 20 industries in the fourth release of General Counsel Metrics (See my post of Nov. 30, 2010: ranked 11 countries on four basic benchmarks.). On lawyers per billion dollars of revenue, legal staff per billion, internal spending as a…
For this exercise, assume four benchmarks are key: lawyers per billion dollars of revenue, legal staff per billion, internal spending as a percentage of revenue, and external spending as a percentage of revenue. For each metric, I ranked all 48 countries that have participating law departments in the fourth release…
For this exercise, assume four benchmarks are key: lawyers per billion dollars of revenue, legal staff per billion, internal spending as a percentage of revenue, and external spending as a percentage of revenue. For each metric, I ranked all 48 countries that have participating law departments in the fourth release…
It probably happens all the time. Someone asks a lawyer for an estimate and the lawyer recalls a few instances but doesn’t look at any metrics. Say a client asks a lawyer to estimate the amount of damages or settlement the client might end up paying for a breach or…
Two pieces in the most recent Economist made me aware of how much revenue many manufacturers bring in from their maintenance and support of their products. One article mentioned the leading elevator (lift) manufacturers: UTC’s Pratt & Whitney, Kone, a ThyssenKrupp division, and Schindler. They make elevators but they also…
If a metric is tracked and paid attention to, such as the number of cases closed during a quarter, you can be sure the litigation lawyers will figure out how to put themselves in the best light. Metrics are not Platonic essences, unchangeable, absolute, pristine. No, numbers are always spun…