General Counsel Metrics, LLC, has prepared Release 1.0 of its report on law department spending and staffing metrics. The 245 law departments reported 6,527 lawyers at the end of 201, with a median of 8. The legal staff in those departments, which includes paralegals and all others, totaled 5,574, with a median of 5. The averages for both figures are much higher than the medians. Note that this first set has one and almost a tenth more lawyers than non-lawyers unlike the typical one-to-one ratio.
With the four best-represented noted in parentheses, the 21 countries with respondents so far are Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil (20), Canada (25), China, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Netherlands, Puerto Rico, Singapore, Spain, Switzerland, UAE, UK (9) and USA (143).
Spending in 2010 a total of $6.2 billion internally and externally, the participants reported in the online free survey a median of $5 million. These law departments helped their respective clients account for nearly $2.6 trillion of revenue (an average of $10 billion and a median of $1.5 billion). That works out to about $400 million in revenue for each lawyer, albeit with extremes at both ends.
To get Release 2.0 in early July and its 25 key benchmark metrics for your industry, click here to take the survey.