Wading through survey rankings by law department managers of why law firms are reluctant to embrace alternatives to hourly billing, I dutifully listed the results in declining average rank order. Having done so, I was struck by the uneven gaps between some of the rankings. In fact, as I calculated…
My supposition, before I began General Counsel Metrics and its global benchmark survey, was that most general counsel would want comparative metrics on staffing and spending in the months just before their budget was due. I thought of that as August and September, mostly. In fact, I have come to…
Wherever there are metrics for managers of law departments, there will be discontent. Someone looks bad if performances or results are compared to others’ and the natural reaction is to discredit the unfavorable numbers. My column for InsideCounsel, Morrison on Metrics, earlier this month draws on my consulting experience where…
Many invitations to complete surveys appear in the e-mail boxes of general counsel. Probably scores of them every year for U.S. departments and they seek all kinds of information. It is an incessant badgering, but how else can interested parties learn about what is going on out there more precisely…
A benchmark that shows up from surveys of law departments is the external spending per in-house lawyer. According to this year’s General Counsel Metrics benchmark survey, for more than 400 departments in the United States, that figure runs around $500,000 per attorney. Stated differently, for the median department, if each…
Total shareholder return (TSR) is a widely used measure of company market performance. Over a period of time, it suggests how analysts and investors value the achievements of a company. Perhaps total legal spending in relation to a rolling three-year TSR makes sense as a benchmark metric (See my post…
My columns for InsideCounsel, Morrison on Metrics, let me dive into small topics, at least to the depth of 500 words. For my latest plunge, I wrote about two chart choices available in Excel. One lets you show trends better when you turn one axis upside down, the other lets…
A new report from Rand, “Innovations in the Provision of Legal Services in the United States,” puts the range of U.S. attorneys at 760,000 to 1,100,000. It cites Harvard Law School Program on the Legal Profession for estimates that in 2007, lawyers in the United States included 120,000 in government…
Courtesy of a recent Rand report, we have the number of attorneys for five European Union countries, according to the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe in 2008: UK (155,323 for 62 million population), Germany (146,910 for 82 million), France (47,765 for 62 million, The Netherlands (14,882 for…
Release 4 goes out this week, bulging with key benchmark metrics from 740 law departments. That marks quite s a jump from 530 legal departments in October’s Release 3. Many more will take part in this epic benchmarking effort before it closes in January – and I hope you do…