The hard fact is that if a general counsel wants to materially dent the internal budget, you have to fire people. Upwards of 80 percent of that budget falls to compensation, benefits, and people-related overhead. To cut you must terminate. My latest column for InsideCounsel Exclusives probes this connection between…
A press release by Thomson Reuters Hildebrandt BakerRobbins about its benchmark findings touts the first-ever decline in year over year total legal spending. In its words, “The 2010 survey showed a decrease in total legal spending – by 1 percent in the U.S. and by 2 percent worldwide – between…
National wealth and solid legal systems support each other, which also justifies management-savvy law departments. Or that is my take-away from a chart in strategy+bus., Winter 2010 at 17. The chart shows manufacturing as a percent of GDP for close to 100 countries. The “innovation-driven nations,” those 36 with per…
A patent is a patent is a patent. We wish, Gertrude. It is comforting to assume that the building blocks of benchmarks, among others lawyers, paralegals, lawsuits, patents, have fairly consistent meanings among general counsel and around the world. For the most part, the operational definitions of these key quantities…
The companies listed on the United States’ major stock exchanges number 4,048. Quite plausibly, each of them has at least one in-house lawyer, if only to deal with Sarbanes-Oxley, SEC filings, and exchange requirements. If I had data on the proportion of US companies over a given revenue or number…
For years I have blithely divided legal spend by company revenue and thought that did the right normalization. Then I read an academic’s research paper that divided a metric by “the average of normalized sales and assets.” Good grief! A normalized number has been transformed into distances from the mid-point…
The fourth release will go out this weekend. It clearly and comprehensively displays aggregate data from 702 law departments. Their companies are based in 46 countries – 51% US – and employ in total more than 20,000 lawyers. The 25 benchmark metrics come broken down by 19 of the countries,…
Some practice areas produce more metrics than others, with the counseling side of life being the most metrically-challenged. Litigation teems with numbers while those who primarily give legal guidance scramble for any metrics. I grappled with this imbalance in my most recent column for InsideCounsel. The torches of metrics shine…
Several years ago, an article in the Admin. Sciences Quarterly, June 2002 at 219, explored the diffusion of ISO 9000 Certificates throughout the world. What caught my eye was a chart that showed 34 countries and the amazing number of such Certificates in them as of the end of 1998:…
With more than 700 participants in the General Counsel Metrics global benchmark survey of law departments, it’s bizarre that only five of them are from procurement or sourcing departments (See my post of May 26, 2010: notes early lack of procurement participation.). I had thought early on that many more…