Each year the Economist uses the cost of a Big Mac in various countries to compare the official exchange rate to that cost. The magazine uses a standard Big Mac in the US ($3.73) as the index and ranks countries according to whether the same order costs above or below…
The September release of the General Counsel Metrics benchmark survey will have more than 600 law departments in it. No wonder, since there are at least a dozen good reasons to submit your department’s data: Find out how you compare against peers by industry, country, revenue and number-of-lawyers Speak the…
Many relationships between metrics are not linear – there is not constant change in one in step with changes in another. In addition, to note a few, there are exponential functions, power-law functions, and U-shaped functions. As an example of a U-function, law departments with few lawyers per billion probably…
If your legal department has scores of lawyers and your company bestrides the commercial world like a colossus – you are on some Fortune list – you find comparable benchmarks hard to find. So, it might pique your interest to learn that the General Counsel Metrics global benchmark, release two,…
This blogger has questioned extranets offered by law firms for their clients on the grounds that law department staff do not want to learn many different systems (See my post of April 8, 2008: extranets with 13 references.). But that view may be misguided. Few law departments have enough uses…
One of the speakers at the SuperConference was from Motorola’s law department. She described the structure of the department, which has two unusual features. Overall, there are four clusters of lawyers dedicated to business units, with regional lawyers reporting up to the heads of them. What is unusual is In…
One of the speakers at the SuperConference was the general counsel of LG Electronics (US), a $6 billion dollar manufacturer that has only five in-house lawyers. Among their efforts to cope with the flood of work was to set clear boundaries between purchase orders (POs) and contracts. The speaker said…
Data from the 500-plus legal departments in General Counsel Metrics benchmark survey highlights how the costs of legal services swing widely in different parts of the world. One example is the subject of my latest Morrison on Metrics column for InsideCounsel: total legal spending – inside budget plus fees paid…
Will you take a few minutes to complete the General Counsel Metrics survey? Will you take another minute and email this post to a general counsel you know who might welcome benchmarking data? Since the release of the first benchmark report on May 31st with its 453 legal departments, another…
The question posed by the header has some easy answers. Much truth lies in the commonplace notion that you can manage something better if you have numbers to back you up. If you know what your average effective rate is for your law firms, you have a full step advantage…