Law departments are everywhere, in every country, yet only some of their lawyers speak English, at least well enough to take an online survey.
I looked back at the first 910 respondents to the General Counsel Benchmarks Survey to see what language they chose. Not surprisingly, in light of my own language and contacts, 92.9 percent took the survey in English. However, quite a few respondents chose from one of the other seven languages available: Spanish (3.1%), French (1.9%), Chinese (1.0%), Brazilian (0.7%), Russian (0.7%) and Italian (0.4%). As can be seen, nearly 10 percent chose another language – none yet have done so in Arabic. This means that many, many legal departments might be interested in global benchmarks but are deterred by language barriers.