An article in strategy + business, Winter 2009 at 42, states the “R&D intensity” for 1,000 global companies. In 2008, the R&D intensity, which is the percentage of sales devoted to R&D, was 3.6 percent, the same as in 2007. Two thoughts deserve mention related to this benchmark. Is it…
Empsight International compiles benchmarks from large law departments as a competitor to Thomson Hildebrandt’s survey. Empsight’s website states that its most recent CLCM Law covers 170 companies, which had median revenue of $12.9 billion dollars, and covers 7,748 lawyers out of 13,558 overall incumbents. Although I could criticize myself for…
A review of a book about “evidence-based medicine” launched this post. Essentially, EBM emphasizes tests and data collection as the guide to the efficacy of medical interventions. Don’t rely on doctors’ anecdotal conclusions, but deliberately gather figures and wade into the statistics of whether aspirin reduces heart disease or flu…
No But allow me to elaborate. If you retain fewer firms, the average number of matters will rise, all other things being equal. If you define matters more broadly, the number will fall. If you allow firms to charge time to general matters, the number will fall. If you set…
Only eight people have taken the moment or two to complete my poll, to the right, about the most useful benchmark metrics for their legal department. Do it now; don’t read the answer below! Seven of the eight respondents (87.5%) chose “total legal spend as a percentage of revenue.” Four…
“You can’t prevent people from gaming numbers, no matter how outstanding your organization. The moment you choose to manage by a metric, you invite your managers to manipulate it. Metrics are only proxies for performance. Someone who has learned how to optimize a metric without actually having to perform will…
Raw numbers have some usefulness, but much more if they are fitted into a context by being weighted. So, for instance, 100 patent applications filed in 2009 tells something about a law department, but that number weighted by R&D spending or invention reports submitted or revenue of the company tells…
I have been compiling a guide to law department benchmarks. While researching it, I realized that this blog has hundreds of metrics, but only some of them fall into a category most general counsel would call benchmarks. They would define benchmarks as commonly-accepted metrics of law department performance. Not that…
An article in the Practical Law J., Vol. 1, Nov. 2009 at 70, offers a benchmark calculation about Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC). That calculation creates an opportunity to reflect on the shortcomings of the common benchmark, lawyers per billion. At $16.5 billion in revenue and around 100 in-house lawyers, CSC…
An article in the Admin. Sciences Quarterly, Vol. 54, June 2009 at 282, describes an index to measure how even or skewed distributions of nonprofits funding were from multiple sources. The same formula should describe the distribution of spending by a legal department on, say, the 20 law firms on…