The members of a law department yield many descriptive metric (See my post of Feb. 26, 2009: start of a series on such metrics.). To review, a descriptive metric puts some aspect of a law department in numeric terms, which encompasses traditional benchmarks but goes beyond them to quantify less…
A benchmarking study of law departments in EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) collected data for 2008 from 123 departments. Conducted by Laurence Simons, a leading legal recruitment firm, and this author, the report is available for a nominal cost from Laurence Simons. The report contains recommendations for most of…
Someday we will be able to describe with numbers most of the primary characteristics of any law department. Such “descriptive metrics” are numbers that convey something about how a law department operates. For example, concentration of spending on law firms: 75 percent of all spend in a year went to…
While discussing power laws, the McKinsey Quarterly, 2009, No. 1 at 13, argues that power curves for revenues of businesses (the sorted distribution of revenue, for example) are often a function of “intangible assets — talent, networks, brands, and intellectual property — because those assets can drive increasing returns to…
Maybe this is six of one, half a dozen of the other. I think that lawyers per billion lets someone more quickly compare their metric to another company’s metric or a benchmark survey. “If the figure is 5 per billion and we are 2 billion, we should have 10 lawyers…
Lloyds TSB paid roughly $18 billion to take over HBOS but the merged financial giant decided to keep the HBOS general counsel as its top lawyer. As disclosed in Corp. Counsel, Vol. 16, Feb. 2009 at 52, Lloyds has a team of about 25 lawyers in its London headquarters while…
The Small Law Department Compensation Survey, conducted in the summer of 2008 by ACC and Empsight, collected responses from 337 organizations. The average revenue of the companies was $500 million with the median revenue of $152 million. A year or so ago I published an article about these three metrics.…
An excellent way to portray data from a collection is the box-and-whisker plot. The box in the middle shows by its top line the third quartile figure in the collection, where 25 percent of the data points in the sample are higher than this value. Above it, a line extends…
When I think of benchmark metrics, I think of a sizable number of law departments each contributing similar data, and a presentation visually or with the quartiles and averages of those numbers. Then each participating law department can compare its own figure with the benchmark figures, such as technology spending…
Many surveys of law departments – such as those from Altman Weil, Thomson Hildebrandt, and Empsight – compare current metrics to the previous year’s metrics. What the survey reports do not do is show how a metric has endured over a period of five years or more. I believe that…