Each year for some time now, your law department has defended more than a dozen employment discrimination lawsuits. Your case management system has stored for those lawsuits their independent variables: type of discrimination alleged, court, plaintiff’s counsel, your counsel, duration of the case, characteristics of the employee, responsible law department…
The budgets of all law departments should include an allocated cost for the space the department occupies. That facilities charge, the equivalent of what the department would pay at market value to rent its offices, conference rooms, library, receptionist and other space, may account for as much as 10 percent…
If the estimates of average savings from five cost-control methods, as reported by the 2002 ACCA/Serengetti Survey of more then 250 law departments, are even close to true, the world of law departments would have leaped to put them in play. They aren’t and they haven’t. According to the summary…
In the NY Times (July 31, 2005 at BU 3) the general counsel of Microsoft, Brad Smith, explained why the company had increased its annual target for patent applications from 2,000 to 3,000. Benchmark studies had shown the software giant, he explained, that other information technology companies filed about two…
It makes sense, setting aside the challenge of calculating their cost, to include equity awards in the budget, but few law departments do so. So, when I learned of a major law department that does include the costs, I realized I had stumbled upon yet another variable treated differently by…
A study by the UK-based firm, Lovells, disclosed that, on average, China’s top 100 companies spend 0.02 percent of their total revenues on legal costs, compared to 1.0 percent for the Fortune 100, and 0.7 percent for big European companies. [That figure for the Fortune 100 is probably three times…
What statisticians call power-law relationships describe the frequency of events occurring according to their size or severity, such as how often earthquakes of different Richter scale magnitudes happen. Power-law relationships are characterized by a number called an index. For each ten-fold increase in the amount paid in settlement of employment…
As scarce as unemployed Supreme Court clerks, those are benchmark metrics on lawyers by in-house practice area. A smatter of figures exist on cases per litigator or patents produced per patent lawyer, but where are useful numbers about employment and labor lawyers per 1,000 employees or environmental lawyers per $1…
A general counsel who values metrics should ponder these seven practices, which came from an article in Cost Management (Nov.-Dec. 2003 at 7): 1. Concentrate on a few strategic measures, such as total legal spending as a percentage of revenue, rather than a “full metrics buffet” (But see my post…
A senior lawyer at a global giant explained to me that currency fluctuations add considerable complexity to his law department’s ability to state precisely what it pays in outside fees. If you pay a bill in January in pound sterling, a second one that month in US dollars, and a…