An unpublished paper submitted by Michele DeStafano Beardslee and three co-authors to the Georgetown Conference on the Future of Law Firms at 3-4 laments benchmark surveys by trade groups and consulting firms. Aside from low response rates and an inability to compare respondents and non-respondents, she singles out a particular…
The position “lawyer,” as in the key benchmark of lawyers per billion of revenue, treats each lawyer as an undifferentiated atomistic unit, but in fact individual lawyers consist of sub-atomic particles galore, so to speak. If we knew more precisely attributes of the constitutive lawyers in legal departments, we would…
“Everyone knows that the scientific revolution involved the replacement of an Aristotelian understanding of nature in terms of qualities by a new understanding, which prioritized quantities.” Although sadly not one of the “everyones,” I read that statement from the J. of the Historical Soc., March 2010 at 43, and it…
Corp. Counsel, March 2010 at 82-85, sets out the fundamental metrics of Dynegy, a $3.5 billion operator of electricity power plants. The legal department has 20 lawyers. Its spending on external counsel in 2009 was $5.1 million, of which only $1.9 million was for litigation. Six law firms accounted for…
If you have wondered whether to complete the benchmarking survey of General Counsel Metrics, wonder no more. It is fast, easy and the participant group is already the largest ever! To find out some of the innovative techniques the report takes advantage of, click on the link that follows for…
With more than 300 respondents during February, the survey population has already reached impressive proportions. I thank all the pioneers who have helped launched such a successful effort. As of a week or so ago, the companies in the survey who submitted full data reported 3,960 lawyers on their legal…
My a priori assumption is that legal departments are evenly distributed within industries by number and lawyer staff when you adjust for the size of the industry. If true, then roughly speaking, an industry that is twice as big as another in total revenue will have twice as many law…
As part of my global benchmarking initiative, I learned from a participant that the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) requires insurance companies to use something called “statutory accounting,” while GAAP accounting is the most common among non-insurance companies. One insurance company’s disclosure statement puts it this way: “These summary…
Privately held companies often keep to themselves the amount of their annual revenue. Unfortunately, if their legal department’s management has an interest in benchmarking but won’t disclose corporate revenue, many key metrics are eviscerated. Notably, lawyers per billion of revenue and total legal spending as a percentage of revenue implode.…
Do benchmark surveys get a normal and fair distribution of participants? All surveys contend with the methodological problem of self-selection. A portion – usually small – of the people invited to take a survey respond, many decline. The small percentage that elects to complete the survey may be unlike the…