In Brazil, half of all businesses are limited liability companies while 45 percent are individual proprietorships. Less than one percent are corporations and of these only about 100 are large companies listed on the Brazilian Stock Exchange. This information comes from Canadian Corporate Counsel Assoc. Mag. (Autumn 2010) at 37. Even so, last year and this year, the total number of participants from Brazil in the General Counsel Metrics benchmark survey exceeded 40.
My point is that if most companies in a country are small, the law department population will also be small (See my post of Aug. 15, 2012: predominance of very small companies in Spain and Italy.).
Quite often, the participants in the General Counsel Metrics benchmark survey from countries other than the United States are in fact a subsidiary of a US company. To give an example, if Ford Motor Indonesia has a law department and it completes the survey, the releases treat it as an Indonesian company for purposes of categorizing the country of its client company.