Of the 455 legal departments in the first release of the General Counsel Metrics LLC study, 41 are based in France, Germany, Italy, or the United Kingdom. The total internal plus external legal expenses reported by those companies divided by their reported revenue equals 0.49 percent. If we arrange each…
It would not surprise me that for many US companies, revenue plummeted during 2009 at a faster rate than total legal spending. Customers can decide not to buy faster than general counsel can terminate staff or reduce outside counsel spend. It true, the leading benchmark metric, total legal spend as…
It would not surprise me that for many US companies, revenue plummeted during 2009 at a faster rate than total legal spending. Customers can decide not to buy faster than general counsel can terminate staff or reduce outside counsel spend. It true, the leading benchmark metric, total legal spend as…
On a panel at the SuperConference, Steve Williams of the General Counsel Roundtable shared the results of a survey of its members regarding “why law departments shy away from data.” More precisely, why they don’t do as much as they might with matter and invoice data. Here are the responses,…
Of the 564 people who submitted data for the largest benchmarking survey ever, almost two thirds of them (63%) are general counsel. The next largest group of respondents is lawyers who report directly to the general counsel (16%). The third most frequent are law department managers (Chief Operating Officers, 8%).…
A survey has a response rate, which is the percentage of surveys returned or taken out of the total population invited to respond. Let’s say a trade group sent a survey to 200 general counsel and 80 took the survey. That is a 40 percent response rate. That survey has…
“In 2003 tort costs were equivalent to 2.2% of American GDP, compared with 1.7% in Italy, 1.1% in Germany and less than 1% in Japan, France and Britain.” The article in the Economist, May 22, 2010, at 68, doesn’t explain those figures but goes on to point out that the…
For purposes of surveys, it is helpful to define the terms “anonymous” and “confidential.” Anonymous means not identified by name. Confidential means private, secret, not universally available or known only to a select few. With a benchmark survey, for example, a general counsel may request that her company name not…
You can get your first edition of the 60-page global benchmarking report from General Counsel Metrics, LLC, if you click here to submit your data or click on the display in the upper right corner. The first release – followed by new ones monthly during the summer and fall as…
Modestly I consider myself an expert on law department benchmarking and benchmark metrics. With that experience, moreover, comes an acute appreciation for methodological morasses, those difficulties that cause data to be less precise or accurate than we wish. I wrote at length about four challenges in a recent article. Click…