A fascinating conference presentation on outside counsel costs, by AGCl Chester Paul Beach at United Technologies, suggests a possible benchmark. The potential metric derives from a chart of Beach’s that shows the distribution of civil litigation involving UTC by seven types.
My estimates from the chart are that almost 30 percent of the total caseload consists of product liability cases; 25 percent employment cases; and 18 percent commercial contracts.
What interests me from a law department management standpoint is whether most manufacturing companies, as a very rough approximation, might have a similar distribution of those three types of suits. Is it plausible that product torts, employment claims, and contract disputes each account for roughly 30 percent of the total litigation?