My global benchmarking uncovers nuances. Here is one that a thoughtful participant wrote about. “I wanted to get your thoughts on a specific question of current interest (with respect to benchmarking). For global corporations such as ours, would you consider European ‘Patent Attorneys’ (resident in Europe) as Lawyers or Non-Lawyer/Other…
It is beyond cavil that over time, total legal spending expressed as a percentage of a company’s revenue (turnover), tells the most about comparative legal department performance (See my post of Nov. 15, 2009: poll results put ratio as most important; and Aug. 21, 2008: total legal spend as percent…
Size matters, and the size of a company as measured by revenue affects its ratio of total legal spending to that revenue. That key ratio, total legal spending (TLS), made up of inside law-department spend plus the department’s external spend – declines the bigger companies become. Why? An article of…
Heads of the legal function should control all spending on external counsel. Should, but don’t. Many general counsel oversee only certain expenditures by their company on external counsel. Finance may retain tax advisors; human resources turns to some partners (including non-law firms) for specialized advice on pensions; the general manager…
Less than three months underway, but already one-third of the way to 1,000 law departments, the largest study of benchmark metrics ever assembled has a geographic distribution that is a function of several factors. First, though, let me share the headquarters locations of those legal departments that have been quality…
My fascination with figures doesn’t blind me, I hope, to misuses of metrics. One potential distortion occurs when a survey reports that “one-third of all respondents think hourly billing is doomed” to support their view that massive change is underway. Perhaps the billing rapture is upon us, but if one…
General counsel, or at least a number of vocal ones, lambaste hourly-based billing by the firms they retain. “It’s not the time spent that matters,” they thunder, “it’s the value of that time!” Heads everywhere nod in agreement, although feet stay planted. At the same time, general counsel, or at…
My publisher has reverted to me copyright on my book, Law Department Benchmarks: Myths, Metrics and Management (Glasser LegalWorks, 2nd ed. 2001). The second edition may be nine years old but it is full of metrics and discussion that are still valid. So, I scanned the entire book by chapter.…
As of today, more than 430 legal departments have submitted data (you can click on the upper right hand ad to do so at no charge). Of them, 314 have provided complete data, so I thought I would share some totals to date. This early set of participants reported 9,887…
We all understand averages, and many of us understand medians, but few of us understand another descriptive statistic for numbers: skewness (See my post of June 30, 2006: skewness; and March 23, 2007: third central moment.). Imagine a bell curve distribution of the bills your legal department received during the…