Dashboards are reporting tools that present visually in one place several key metrics and at a glance give a sense of the department’s performance against a goal. Legal department managers ought to think in terms of dashboards as that thinking disciplines them to consider, gather and analyze metrics that are…
PatentBuddy.com maintains a database of employment statistics for registrants to the U.S. Patent Bar. For the six-month period ending March 30, 2008, the company identified about 1,000 new patent agent/attorney registrations. Among those, 69 (6.8%) were “affiliated with corporations.” For the following quarter, the 525 new registrants included 8.8 percent…
A general counsel might agree to provide to a primary law firm the department’s historical data on some class of matters. The only data redacted would be the name of the law firm that handled the matter (and any identifying information about timekeepers and rates). Thus the firm would be…
If law departments disclosed the average LSAT score of their lawyers (the standardized test everyone takes who applies to a US law school), might that metric predict some key benchmarks? For example, might lawyers per billion of revenue decline as average LSAT scores rise (See my post of Aug. 28,…
According to a recent survey, total legal spending per lawyer varies little between the median US figure and the worldwide figure. The two, presented by Jon Bellis during a webinar, showed United States lawyers at $1,056,351 per lawyer and worldwide lawyers at $35,000 less, $1,021,442. The three-percent difference surprises me…
If a group of law departments have similar ratios of lawyers to non-lawyers, then a comparison of fully-loaded internal cost per lawyer hour gets at something comparable and meaningful. Otherwise, if the data comes from law departments that have significantly different staff ratios, the hourly cost match ups do not…
Most surveys report average figures, such as the average billing rate of outside counsel or the average number of lawyers per billion of revenue. Most reports calculate their averages by adding each participant’s figure and dividing by the number of participants. That crude average means that law department of two…
An aggressive, creative company – one that probably has higher margins than a less pushy company does – is likely to face more lawsuits than a relatively stodgy company that sticks to its knitting. If the brash company challenges other companies, pushes into new areas, creates markets, and tries innovative…
An article in the ACC Docket, Vol. 27, March 2009 at 86, lays out a roadmap for how to get more from your matter management system (MMS). The author, Nanci Tucker, touts the performance metrics that an MMS can generate. “Common metrics in the area of staff productivity include the…
A senior executive at a legal services company wrote me. He sent data about differences between law departments in the same industry in terms of lawyers per billion of revenue: “Here are some Lawyer/Revenue ($Bn) figures (that may not be accurate) that I came up with combining the Fortune 500…