When talking with a friend recently, it dawned on me that every time a general counsel gathers metrics and ponders what they mean, someone in the law department is at risk. Metrics are never neutral numbers, existing on their own independently of humans. Rather, all metrics speak to some absolute…
LawProspector, founded in early 2008 by a group of attorneys working in the litigation support field, has gathered data on the largest active pieces of litigation in the US federal courts. This data “is loosely defined by the intersection of the world’s top 200 law firms, top 100,000 law firm…
If you standardize the values of variables that vary on their measurements, you can compare their relative magnitude. For example, say you want to match how your department stands on cases per lawyer against paralegal base pay. The two metrics exist on incommensurable scales. But you can express both metrics…
A report from BNA, HR Department Benchmarks and Analysis 2008, found the median per capita budgeted expenditure for HR departments was $1,082 per worker in 2006. The counterpart for legal would be total legal spending per corporate worker. I have never seen that figure calculated and analyzed, probably because it…
A recent article reports that IBM’s patent attorneys “filed more than 70 percent of the company’s patents in 2008 for software and services.” The article does not say what percentage of Big Blue’s hardware and other patent applications are generated in-house. Corp. Counsel, Vol. 16, June 2009 at 75, published…
Mavens of metrics might want to see the full cupboard of metaposts that are available on this blog. Here they are! One group covers a range of benchmark topics (See my post of Feb. 25, 2008: practice area benchmarks with 24 references; Jan. 12, 2009: historical changes in benchmarks over…
I thought about an encore to my recent thoughts on key benchmarks for legal department managers, those that are known and some that are not (See my post of July 9, 2009: ten most fundamental benchmarks; and July 10, 2009: ten benchmarks general counsel may wish they could obtain.). I…
At one point this Spring I set off on an ambitious series of posts about what I call “descriptive metrics.” I persuaded myself that I had hit upon a higher-level way to quantify and depict legal department performance and characteristics. Eight posts eventually saw the light of day, but I…
Having presented the ten most fundamental benchmarks for legal department managers, all of them available from various sources, I mention here ten benchmarks that many general counsel may wish were more available (See my post of July 9, 2009: ten crucial metrics.). Effective hourly rates of law firms that account…
For US law departments that have more than five lawyers, here are the fundamental ten metrics: They spend approximately 0.5% of their corporation’s revenue each year on their inside plus their external spend. That benchmark for “total legal spending” does not include settlements, judgments and fines, which vary widely but…