Back in March of 2008, the ACLA/CLANZ Legal Department Benchmarking Report 2008 delivered the results of a survey of more than 125 companies and government agencies that together spend over a billion Australian dollars on lawyers each year. The report was commissioned by the Australian Corporate Lawyers Association (ACLA) and…
My most recent column for InsideCounsel analyzes benchmark metrics for law departments in their totality compared to the same metrics for portions of law departments that serve a particular country or region. To illustrate the difference, Samsung might provide data for its entire, global department or Samsung UK might participate…
Having hypothesized that the legal intensity of a company is in part a function of the pace of technological change in its industry, I have written about how we might measure the technological intensity of an industry (See my post of Dec. 3, 2009: R&D intensity.). One measure often used…
Conscientious benchmark analysts should be concerned about whether their sample of respondents fair represents the entire population. My General Counsel Metrics benchmark survey, to take one example, has nearly 100 members of the Fortune 500 but are they sufficiently similar to the departments that have not responded from the Fortune…
A quartet of legal departments made the finalist list in Corporate Counsel “best law department” contest (See Corp. Counsel, June 2010 at 68.). Unable to help myself, I cobbled together their benchmarks. This little sample harbors four observations. First, lawyers per billion of this group, at 5.24, is no slimmer…
R&D spending as a percentage of revenue probably associates closely to total legal spending as a percentage of revenue (See my post of Aug. 13, 2008: R&D spending and its association with total legal spending; Dec. 21, 2005: IP lawyers per million dollars of R&D spend; and July 13, 2008…
A phrase about international legal spending set me thinking. It comes from Managing Ptr., July-Aug. 2010 at 25, and covers highlights of Acritas’ sharplegal report. Based on data provided from buyers of legal services totaling more than US$3 billion in global legal spend in 2010, the article includes this sentence,…
As explained on Wikipedia, Cronbach’s α (alpha) is a statistic commonly used to measure the internal consistency or reliability of survey questions. Alpha is most appropriately used when the items measure different substantive areas within a single construct, such as client or employee satisfaction. A “high” value of alpha is…
An article in the Acad. Mgt. Rev., Aug. 2005 at 662, explains that “industry complexity refers to the competition in an industry that stems from concentration, or the market share dominance of one or more firms.” The industry becomes more complex in part because the dominant large firms restrict smaller…
My most recent column for InsideCounsel, under Morrison on Metrics, ponders a better way to represent litigation metrics. It discusses the shortcomings of case and staff counts. In the end, it sides with staff and even proposes a methodology to combine internal hours and external hours into one comprehensive metric.…