Based on three different estimates, and admittedly sketchy data, it is plausible that more than 20,000 US companies have legal departments. Test my reasoning and let me know how well it holds up. First, In-house lawyers as percentage of practicing lawyers, and then average lawyers per law department. Lawyers in…
My hypothesis runs like this: as companies generate more revenue for each employee, they are likely to be in higher margin industries, less labor intensive, more intellectual property intensive. As such, per employee they probably have more lawyers in-house. This speculation came to me as I read in the ACC…
Theoretically we can describe every legal department with a single index figure. The figure captures for each department its four fundamentals of metrical benchmarks: number of legal staff, amount of legal spend, size of corporate revenue, and category of industry. Calculations can then show how every other legal department compares…
On May 6th, Martindale-Hubble’s Connected will host a webinar on law department management metrics. The first findings from the largest-ever benchmarking, prepared by General Counsel Metrics, LLC, will be released and discussed that day. All you need to do to take part is join Connected and sign up. In-house counsel…
Tesseracts are four-dimensional cubes with sixteen corners and thirty-two edges (compared to a cube’s eight and twelve). Topologists and geometric mathematicians work with and describe tesseracts by using four coordinates for each point. By comparison, the standard X-Y graph uses two coordinates for each point; a three-dimensional graph adds another…
An article about the costs of e-discovery raises an idea regarding mandatory collection of data from law departments and what they spend for litigation and on e-discovery. “It would do the [Federal Rules Advisory Committee] good to collect data on that subject and corporations should be willing to provide it.”…
Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot, The Numbers Game (Gotham Books 2009) at 18, gave me the idea to translate legal department spend into dollars per lawyer per day. We can all grasp more easily such human-scale metrics. I started with the departments that have participated in the global benchmarking survey…
The 2002 PricewaterhouseCoopers Law Department Spending Survey, covering data from nine years ago, yields a couple of observations. The report states at page 4 under “Company Ownership” that 24 of the participants are a subsidiary of a publicly traded company. Confusingly, then, under “Corporate Governance” its shows 20 participants are…
Take your total legal spending (your budget for internal compensation and operations plus your expenditures on law firms and other external vendors). Divide that number by your lawyer count at the end of the year. If you are a large US corporation, that result likely falls into a range around…
A chart in a consulting report did an excellent job of conveying efficiently quite a bit of information. It had thirteen columns, with no spaces between them, each column being for a different type of spending by the client law department on its law firms, e.g., litigation, patent prosecution, offensive…