An article by Thomson Hildebrandt consultants in Exec. Counsel, April/May 2010 at 27, mentions differences in cost per hour of inside lawyers and outside counsel. As found by the group’s survey, “the fully-loaded inside hourly cost per lawyer is $214. The effective rate of outside counsel is 35-50 percent higher.”…
The profiles of general counsel that appear in various trade publications dwell on employees, revenue and the number of lawyers, but they don’t ask about spending or non-lawyer staff. Even so, there is much to glean. Take one instance. In Practical Law, June 2010 at 92, we learn that Proctor…
Using my data from legal departments of 42 technology companies, I calculated their standardized scores. Standardized scores convert a metric into standard deviations above or below the average (See my post of Aug. 4, 2009: compare differences in terms of standard deviations; July 31, 2009 #4: also known as a…
Using my data from legal departments of 42 technology companies, I calculated their standardized scores. Standardized scores convert a metric into standard deviations above or below the average (See my post of Aug. 4, 2009: compare differences in terms of standard deviations; July 31, 2009 #4: also known as a…
In a network market for a service, the value of the service increases with the number of its adopters. A clear example would be a benchmark survey since the value of the reports increase directly with the expansion of the survey participants group (the same for collective evaluations of law…
With so much of my effort the past five months on the General Counsel Metrics benchmark survey, I made a bard pun to lead into my posts on benchmark methodology. Several of them grapple with the meanings of key terms (See my post of Dec. 15, 2009: how to define…
Having offered ten reasons for initial reluctance to participate in a benchmarking study, I realized disappointedly I have not exhausted the topic (See my post of Aug. 29: 2008: ten reasons some CLOs defer benchmark surveys.). In fairness to general counsel who decline to include their department’s data in a…
My inaugural column for the online InsideCounsel, dated May 24th, looked at an example of correlations between inside and outside spending of law departments. We are at an exciting point in law department research because the database of metrics from 600+ law departments permits analyses that could not previously have…
A recently published study of litigation had to set some parameters for the general counsel who responded to a survey. What activities should they count as “litigation” and which should they excluded? “Respondents were instructed not to consider internal investigations or the broader universe of administrative or regulatory proceedings that…
One way to help us understand a data set is a stem-and-leaf display. Click on the example below. It illustrates the 32 smallest law departments that took part in the General Counsel Metrics benchmark since the first release on June 1st. Each number in the left column – the stem…