Interviews in the summer of 2005 with 97 “senior decision-makers who help choose outside counsel” were “done in conformance with generally accepted research principles set forth in CASRO and ESOMAR, [and] has a sampling error of +/- 10%.” (From Kirkpatrick & Lockhart Nicholson Graham’s Top of Mind 2005 survey) I…
Although legal-department benchmarking studies always compare inside spending, no one has definitively defined all its components. In a recent project, we encountered three problematic situations. One law department includes severance costs in its budget; many law departments never see them because HR picks up those costs. Some law departments are…
A study of companies with U.S. revenues greater than $8 billion from the Hildebrandt 2005 U.S. Law Department Survey indicates a correlation between company revenues and number of attorneys. The median number of U.S. attorneys per 1,000 US employees is 1.5, but, more importantly, as revenue per employee increases, so…
Some surveys ask law departments to say how many lawsuits the departments had pending at the end of the year. That number, however, is fraught with problems. Principally, all lawsuits are not created equal. One class action can swallow more time and money than hundreds of slips and falls. Even…
Some companies have within their ambit business operations that are widely dissimilar. Conglomerates do, as do others, such as Alcoa, Altria, and universal banks. It is impossible for their law departments to find enough other companies to benchmark against that have a similar mix of business segments. The solution is…
According to the Economist, Dec. 17, 2005 at 32, James Copland of the Centre for Legal Policy at the conservative Manhattan Institute recently studied “health-care litigation – including suits against doctors, drug firms, HMOs, nursing homes and so on.” Copland estimates that such litigation’s total costs, direct and indirect, “could…
Deryl Earson, Vice President Legal Services of Environmental Management Corp., part of the BOC Group, spoke at the ACC 2005 Annual Meeting about legal department benchmarks. One of his examples came from his department’s practice of tracking how many days it takes to negotiate and execute each major customer contract…
In the winter of 2002-2003, the American Prosecutor’s Research Institute (APRI) conducted a performance audit of the Pierce County (Washington) Prosecuting Attorney’s Office. The report (at 9) included survey data collected nationally in 2001 by the US Dept. of Justice’ Burea of Justice Statistics. Nationally, the ratios of attorney to…
During the summer of 2005, 412 inside corporate counsel responded to an online survey sponsored by ACC and Corpedia, a provider of ethics and compliance training. Some 85 percent of those respondents were at US-based companies, and 60 percent were with publicly-traded companies. The surveyors reported that “for organizations between…
The law department at BellSouth has prepared a manual to help its members understand, collect, and analyze operational metrics. The manual lays out uniform operating guidelines, for example, as well as “clear definitions of processes, metrics categories, and how financial information will be gathered. (From Jan. 2005 materials of ACC,…