Those who analyze the comparative performances of different law departments could treat the benchmark metric of total legal spending (TLS) per unit of revenue as a productivity metric. Among a group of companies whose businesses are roughly comparable, the law department with a lower ratio of TLS to revenue is to that degree more productive.
The lower the ratio, the more revenue a given legal investment helps generate. One company with 0.35 percent of revenue spent on legal affairs delivers legal services more efficiently than a peer whose ratio is 0.45 percent. More precisely, the first company is about 30 percent more legally productive.