In a recent consulting project, we gathered benchmark data from leading companies on their in-house counsel in several substantive specialties: corporate, litigation, intellectual property, and compliance, were included. We normalized those figures against the companies’ revenue, such as IP lawyers per billion of revenue. Even though comparable law departments can…
Reading Freakonomics, the entertaining book by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, it struck me that I have never seen the total cost of the legal function – inside plus outside spending – expressed in terms of a company’s profit margin. To know that in a low margin business like grocery…
The Office of the General Counsel for the National Labor Relations Board spends much of its time handling charges of unfair labor practices (ULPs). An excellent report in 1999 by the General Counsel, Fred Feinstein, helps us think about quantifying legal complexity. [www.lawmemo.com/nlrb/gchighlights.htm] ULP determinations had become more complex. The…
Are your department’s vital statistics as shapely as those of competitors? Gathering those comparative metrics, such as lawyers per billion dollars of revenue, means one kind of benchmarking. Studying how other law departments handle a practice, such as document discovery, means another kind of benchmarking. With practices benchmarking, a general…
Ever since publishing my book on law department benchmarks, and despite consulting mostly to law departments of large companies, I am still mystified why total legal spending declines (as a percentage of revenue) as company revenue rises. A research paper, however, perplexed me further. It cited a 1990 survey of…
US general counsel deserve some sympathy for being bombarded with surveys. Recently, a vendor, Serengeti, mailed a questionnaire to 6,600 ACC members, with at least one questionnaire to each law department that had an ACC member. In addition, ACC e-mailed the questionnaire to its list of in-house counsel, so presumably…
Have you ever seen a comparison of spending by the major staff groups, each groups spending as a percentage of the company’s revenue? I have not seen multi-company data on spending per billion dollars of revenue for Information Systems or Finance or Human Resources, but I have seen figures from…
I recommend that lawyers set annual objectives, and some of those objectives lend themselves to measurement. Close four bond issuances; file 18 patents, resolve two-thirds of the EEOC charges within six months, and the like. Measurement, however, runs amok if management forces staff lawyers to conjure up too many goals…
Three hundred companies provided data for Fulbright & Jaworski’s 2004 Litigation Trends Survey. According to it, for the hundred companies with more than $1 billion in revenues, the median company faced 86.2 pending cases in litigation. The summary I read gave no further breakdown of this number so the 86…
Three presenters at ACC’s 2004 Annual Meeting, from ConocoPhilips, duPont, and BellSouth, discussed six metrics under this heading. All I have are the overheads. The six metrics and their sub-metrics: (1) case inventory; (2) total cost to resolve (TCR+); and (3) dispute cycle time – each of those three having…