Musing about a will-o-the-wisp metric of “lawyers per initiative” in legal departments I conclude that the quest is futile. Even if we define an initiative as a formal management effort and can reliably count them – license a new software system, change the mentoring program, set up a pro bono…
The metaphorical difference between a thermometer, which gives you a figure but doesn’t tell you what to do about it, and a thermostat, which gives you a figure and then adjusts the heating or cooling appropriately, applies to benchmark figures. It’s a thermometer to know that most law departments in…
Some general counsel hold their cards close to their vests; they hide their staff numbers, how much they spend on outside counsel, the litigation load they face, locations of lawyers, everything. Yet mighty United Technologies didn’t mind sharing detailed benchmark metrics about its number of lawyers, caseload, spend on external…
A chart in a presentation recently about the legal function at United Technologies gives the numbers of firms the manufacturing giant retains in the US and outside the US. If we take the most recent year’s total (418 firms in 2008) and the UTC revenue given in the presentation ($58.4…
A fascinating conference presentation on outside counsel costs, by AGCl Chester Paul Beach at United Technologies, suggests a possible benchmark. The potential metric derives from a chart of Beach’s that shows the distribution of civil litigation involving UTC by seven types. My estimates from the chart are that almost 30…
A wonderful picture of many of the lawyers in the legal department of United Technologies says above it: “248 lawyers – 21 countries.” That photo, in a presentation by Associate General Counsel Chester Paul Beach at a conference in early December, adds nuance to a previous source that said UTC…
Let’s suppose that five law departments lauded everywhere boast total legal spending in terms of revenue less than the median for their respective industries and each of them uses electronic billing software. In other words, 100 percent of those fiscal wizards receive bills electronically. What are the odds, however, that…
The more members there are in a network, the greater its value. Think of Facebook and LinkedIn. This intuitive appreciation of why more participants in a benchmark study means more reliable and valued results was recognized and quantified by Robert Metcalf, the creator of Ethernet. As the Economist Tech. Quarterly,…
Every benchmark metric about staff ought to concern itself with full-time equivalents (FTE). The number appears to be plain vanilla, but reality serves tutti-fruity. It is not as simple as the normal adjustments for those who start and leave during the year. What about contract employees or temps; how do…
Hildebrandt, a business within Thomson Reuters, shared some data on cost control strategies from its 2009 Law Department Survey. It laid out a slew of metrics, but it is hard to know how real they are or what a general counsel can rely on. For example, “55% of the companies…