The Harvard Business Review (April 2005 at page 18) reported a study that compared the financial performance of companies in relation to the size of its headquarters staff. Headquarters staff size correlates with size of company, but it did not correlate at all with the financial performance of the company. …
Can a single metric describe different level structures, for instance of three legal groups of 10 lawyers each, where (a) has a GC, four AGCs, and five junior-level lawyers, (b) has a GC, three AGCs, and six juniors, and (c) has a GC and nine direct reports at the same…
Law departments overseeing substantial intellectual property portfolios, such as hundreds of patents or thousands of trademarks or both, often license specialized IP management systems like those from Master Data Center, Dennemeyer and CPI. Companies with that level of need for tracking patent and trademark data also tend to be large…
No paralegals. That’s the fact in large swathes of Latin American, Asian and European law departments outside the UK . They have lawyers aplenty and secretaries galore, but not legal assistants of the kind common in US legal functions. US law departments report a median of about one paralegal for…
According to an article in Patent World (Sept. 2004), a 2003 survey of the American Intellectual Property Lawyers Association found that “the average cost of bringing a patent litigation is almost US$2 million.” [Article available on www.ipworldonline.com]. As a connoisseur of metrics, this claims raises several, shall we say, patent…
BTI Consulting published some figures and conclusions in Law Practice (Oct. 2004, pg. 13) that stuck in my craw. “In 2004, overall client spending on legal affairs dipped almost 7 percent [from 2003]. Despite these cuts, spending on outside counsel continues to rise, climbing 4.4 percent in 2004. Shrinking legal…
I like metrics, I always use them in consulting projects, I gather them in benchmark studies, and I published two editions of a book on them – BUT whenever I see a set of law department metrics, I can’t help critiquing them. K&L in 2004 conducted a survey, some of…