In Met. Corp. Counsel, March 2012 at 16, an FTI consultant mike.kinnaman@fticonsulting.com shares some findings from FTI’s interviews last fall with 31 in-house counsel. The topic was e-discovery and the participants were primarily from huge U.S. companies. He writes, “In spite of greater emphasis and attention on e-discovery, corporations still…
A recent survey provided InsideCounsel with average total cash compensation for the five practice areas at the top. They were M&A ($288,962), Antitrust ($280,441), International ($257,097), Intellectual Property – Licensing ($252,948), and Tax ($250,209). These figures came from a data set that includes a fairly high proportion of large law…
A recent survey asked respondents about the bases for raises to their in-house lawyers. By far the dominant reason was “merit,” with 94% of the respondents checking that reason. A lawyer perceived as adding more value to the company deserves a fatter paycheck. Next came promotions, at 80%, where rising…
An article in Fortune, April 9, 2012 at 16, describes an ingenious method to quantify the possibility that companies will tangle over their patents. An analyst needs to compare how often companies cite each other’s patents in their own applications. “If each company’s patents are of equal quality, and each…
Unable to pass up metrics that pertain to law departments, unwilling not to squeeze metrics for what might drip out, I will confess that a recent sentence left me puzzled. In Met. Corp. Counsel, March 2012 at 16, an FTI consultant shares some findings from FTI’s interviews with 31 in-house…
The ALM benchmark survey in 2011 gathered data that broke down participants’ external spend. Some thirty departments gave figures for their outside counsel spend as well as for their external spend other than outside counsel, such as expert witnesses, patent maintenance and filing fees, directors’ costs, etc. The median ratio…
Of a group of respondents to the ALM Legal Intelligence survey last year, 75 answered a question regarding whether they had “contracted during the last fiscal year with any legal service providers (or vendors) to provide outsourced services.” Of them, 48 said “no” they had not and 23 said “yes.”…
What makes estimations of return on investment intractable is the inherent reliance on unreliable assumptions. All ROI “calculations” depend on givens: “Lawyers spend at least 10 minutes a day looking for documents,” “Paralegals costs us about $25 an hour,” “We prepare more than 30 placement agreements a quarter,” or “Approximately…
It is well recognized that internal law department costs consist mostly of compensation and benefits. The data from ALM’s latest metrics collection corroborates that belief. In fact, it comes up higher than some general rules of thumb. Based on the numbers reported by about 70 U.S. legal departments, 86 percent…
A column in the ACC Docket, Dec. 2011, at 24, by an unabashed proponent of offshoring who invests in companies that provide those services, went too far. He recounts an ABA panel which “showed that outsourcing legal work is more than a trend among law firms and corporate legal departments.”…