Volumes have been written on DuPont’s management initiatives to improve its law department’s effectiveness (See my post of June 30, 2006 on the marketing of law departments and four references to DuPont.) Hence, it caught my attention where a piece in Corp. Counsel, Vol.15, Jan. 2008, at 111, states that…
We lack reliable benchmark metrics for practice areas of law departments (See my posts of July 20, 2005 and May 28, 2005 on this missing set of metrics.). A few, though, have appeared on this blog. Contracts (See my post of Jan. 6, 2006: contracts handled per commercial lawyer.); Corporate…
It is a powerful tool to quantify how some amount changes when another number changes, such as to understand how the number of independent claims in a litigated patent influences total outside counsel fees — to calculate the correlation between one set of numbers and the other (See my post…
Too many “analyses” of survey data do no more than regurgitate the findings. “Twenty percent of all the law departments have receptionists.” That style of factoid reporting has a bit of value, but an analysis that matches the data against another set of meaningful data is far more useful. That…
In November of last year, I published an article in Legal Times about the three most important benchmarks for law departments: total legal spending as a percentage of revenue, the fully-loaded cost of inside counsel, and total legal staff per billion of revenue. Since the article came out, I have…
When I was an in-house consultant for Merck’s law department, GE Medical Systems invited us to take part in a benchmarking exercise. What was unusual about the effort was that GE Medical sent four of its lawyers to spend a full day at Merck. During that day, their lawyers met…
For those who care about law department benchmarks, there is a gap in the metrics that we ought to have. Data is scarce about the difference it makes in law department staffing and spending if a company is not publicly traded or if it is a US subsidiary of a…
Total revenue of the Fortune 500 companies in 2005 was $9.1 trillion (See my posts of Dec. 3, 2006 for this figure; and Sept. 10, 2005 on the 100 largest corporate law departments.). Since total legal spending as a percentage of revenue stands at something like 0.4 percent of revenue,…
Everyone thinks you benchmark to find other law departments’ best practices. The goal is to copy or adopt successes. But the pratfalls of others have instructional value as much can be gleaned from those stumbles. Benchmarking “worst practices” may not occur to general counsel yet it would enable them to…
Total legal spending as a percentage of revenue stands out as the pre-eminent benchmark. It varies, however, according to size (See my post of May 4, 2005 on TLS as a percentage of revenue declining as revenue increases; and Dec. 3, 2007 for some possible explanations.) and within an industry.…