As part of a recent project, three law departments stated the amounts they had paid in settlements during the previous three years. Taking their 2004 revenue as revenue for 2003 and 2002 (which is approximately on the mark), the three paid .08%, .09% and .12% of that three-year revenue in…
Law firms paid more than $100,000 in a year usually are key firms for a law department. As such, they are also the most likely candidates for alternative billing arrangements and other management initiatives. Based on some recent benchmarking, for firms paid more then $100,000 in 2004 per billion dollars…
My post of April 9, 2005 discussed IT, HR, and Finance benchmarks as polestars for legal benchmarks. A book I reviewed recently The Professional Services Firm Bible, John Baschab and John Piot, Eds.offered two benchmarks on Finance. With the first, the book showed Finance headcount as a percentage of business…
A 2005 study by Laurence Simons [www.laurencesimons.com] draws on compensation data from 9,000 legal professionals and more than 50 multinationals in 16 countries. The executive search firm published base salary data in U.S. dollars for six Asian countries. The only size category with full data consisted of departments with 1-5…
An audit report on a city’s Law Department (Austin, Texas) collected several useful performance measures for litigation group. [http://www.ci.austin.tx.us/auditor] I have slightly modified the various listings. Number of claims received Number of lawsuits received Percent of cases (lawsuits and claims, which are mutually exclusive) resolved without payment Average settlement amount…
In 2003, the City Auditor reviewed Austin’s Law Department [http://www.ci.austin.tx.us/auditor]. The Auditor’s 73-page report showed law department budgets – nationwide averages, Texas city averages, and Austin – per resident. The number of residents serves as the normalizing denominator, in the same way that revenue normalizes law department budgets of for-profit…
Benchmark surveys include the operational costs of law departments (mostly compensation, but also facilities, T&E, training, IT and other internal costs) and departments’ payments to vendors (mostly law firms). They rarely include other law-related payments, such as fines, judgments and settlements. Legal departments do not provide the elusive data because…
A LegalMetric study of more than 200,000 federal civil cases terminated during fiscal year 2004, was reported in The Capital Times on May 24, 2005. The study showed the Western District of Wisconsin tied for first place with the Eastern District of Pennsylvania as the courts with the fastest filing-to-termination…
A recent study by the National Center for State Courts compared a large set of jury verdicts in 2001 to the published data from those cases by 20 reporting services. Disturbingly, the NCSC found twice as many jury verdicts as the services reported. (27 Nat. L.J. 11 (May 23, 2005)…
Online trademark applications have increased steadily since 1999. Corporate Legal Times showed a graphic of the rise of electronic applications, based on data from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. I estimated the numbers for the table below. The final entry covers the first quarter of FY2005 (the USPTO fiscal…