Over the three-year span of the survey, the average size of FTSE 500 legal departments surveyed has grown from an average of 25 lawyers to 62 …” Pause, and reflect on the quoted portion about rapid growth (See my post of Dec. 5, 2006 about the end of the quote,…
The largest law department in New Jersey is the Attorney General’s Division of Law – all 580 lawyers. The Division represents all 16 departments and more than 400 agencies in the New Jersey state government. The NJ Law J., Nov. 27, 2006, explains the difficulties the Division has had keeping…
Selection bias distorts a statistical analysis because of how the data was collected (See my post of Dec. 1, 2006 for an introduction.). Let’s consider some examples in the context of law departments. Self-selection bias. Law department lawyers with strong opinions, deep interests, or substantial knowledge may be more willing…
The total revenue of the Fortune 500 in 2005 was $9.1 trillion. Based on the Hildebrandt 2006 Law Department Survey, median lawyers per billion dollars of worldwide revenue the same year was 3.1 (per billion dollars of US revenue it was 4.4 lawyers). Multiplying the Fortune 500 revenue by the…
An article by Austan Goolsbee, NY Times, Sept.14, 2006 at C3 describes a researcher’s pitfall: selection bias. If most of someone’s data comes from what surfaces on its own, the data may not be representative of the entire universe of data. Selection bias applies to what we think we know…
Among the ten lawyers at Palm Inc., one is “on a contract basis because she is working in Germany.” This fact gets no elaboration in the interview of Mary Doyle, general counsel of Palm, published in Law.com In-House Counsel, but the contract basis may have to do with the difficult…
Many companies operate in more than one market segment. Nevertheless, benchmark surveys treat them as if they operate in only one, in only one industry. How can benchmarkers accurately categorize General Electric, MetLife or Johnson Controls, to name only three companies that have varied operations? One methodology asks the companies…
Gill Hague, a consultant and director of Legal Project Services Ltd., sent some numbers from a Law Society report on lawyers with a Practicing Certificate in central government departments (See my post of April 13, 2006 for more on Hague’s dissertation.). The Law Society – Britain’s equivalent to the American…
Along with my previous posts on statistical analysis (See my post of May 31, 2006,), graphical depictions of data (See my post of June 30, 2006 on analysis and depiction tools.), and net score analyses (See my post of Sept. 25, 2006.), consider some of the other calculations that can…
A recent survey of European law departments confirmed what many people have known and this blog has supported: as companies increase in size the ratio of numbers of lawyers per billion dollars of revenue decreases. Data in Law Dept. Quarterly, Sept./Nov. 2006 at 19, confirms that economies of scale and…