Law Department Management Blog
The legal department of Harrah’s Entertainment, profiled in Corp. Counsel, Jan. 2011 at 82, has 62 people, of which 22 are lawyers. That means 40 of them are not lawyers, a quite high distribution. Very typically US law departments of much size have a one-to-one ratio of lawyers to non-lawyers. Harrah’s has a ratio close to one-to-two, which suggests a heavy complement of paralegals.
The Harrah’s general counsel also has reporting to him a regulatory and compliance department of 29. The ratio of law department members (62) to compliance members (29) presents one instance of a little-discussed benchmark. I would not even hazard an estimate of what might be a typical ratio based on Harrah’s because its law department structure differs so much from the norm.
Finally, the profile notes that the general counsel of Harrah’s, who works in Las Vegas, commutes each week there from Scottsdale, Arizona. Timothy Donovan is not the only general counsel who flies or has flown to work (See my post of June 9, 2007: cites three other general counsel who commuted by plane to their office.).