According to Researching Law, Spring 2010 at 9, “Until very recently, the bar passage rate in South Korea has been extremely low – even less than 5% — so that studying law in South Korea in preparation for a legal career was an extremely risky path for young people to…
As particle physicists delve deeper into the atom, they find stranger and stranger properties at very small scales: anti-particles, quarks, uncertainty principles, strong and weak forces, flavors. Loosely analogously, as benchmarkers gather data from law departments of one or two lawyers, the standard metrics turn strange. Inside spend per lawyer…
Research will confirm, I predict, that the larger the profit margin of a company, the more it spends on legal services. Profit margin is net income divided by revenues, or net profits divided by sales: how much out of every dollar of income a company keeps in earnings. Fatter margins…
I’ve been on a kick to figure out the number of law departments in this country. One method might be to count the number of companies in the United States that have publicly traded securities. Not all of them have an internal legal function, we can accept, but quite a…
Assume you have total legal spending as a percentage of revenue for hundreds of legal departments. Assume further that you gather demographic and career data about the general counsel of those departments. Directories such as the Aspen Directory of Corporate Counsel will provide quite a bit of this background, supplemented…
We might be able to deduce the approximate number of legal departments in a country based on its Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Follow my reasoning from four examples. Portugal’s organization for in-house lawyers has 1,200 members. If the typical law department employs three lawyers, that suggests something like 400 departments…
To a fair degree, a sizeable benchmarking study can isolate law departments that have all or nearly all their lawyers in one country. Once you recognize, however, that foreign companies may also have groups of lawyers in that country it becomes murkier to produce data “on a country.” An example…
More than a hundred members of Connected registered for the hour-long webinar on May 6th. Three panelists, including this blogger, explained the benchmark study of General Counsel Metrics, which had 362 participants in the preliminary data presented. The first part of the session explained the study and the benefits from…
With the data from the ongoing survey of General Counsel Metrics, it will be possible to tell whether departments in the UK, for example, differ in their fundamental metrics from departments in France. Certainly the metrics will differ, such as internal spend as a percentage of all legal spend. But…
The coefficient of variation is the ratio of the standard deviation of a set of numbers to the average value of the numbers. The lower the coefficient the tighter the data set. For example, using more than 350 law departments that have participated in the General Counsel Metrics survey of…