In benchmark survey, law departments that gave no information on matter management software had fairly typical legal spend to revenue

Two previous posts have shared analyses of the matter management systems of participants in this year’s General Counsel Metrics survey (See my post of June 13, 2011: leading systems by number of departmental users; and June 14, 2011: comparison of leading systems to non-users on total legal spending.). The 142 law departments that did not answer about their matter management system or who responded “none” might have a different profile in terms of total legal spend as a percentage of revenue.

Not so. The average total legal spend of that group was 0.77 percent of revenue and the median was 0.41. As compared to users of matter management systems, the average was slightly lower and the median slightly higher. What confounds these very preliminary findings is that some of the non-respondents might have declined to identify their department’s matter management system. They might not have known the name, they might not have wanted to disclose the information, or they might simply not have cared enough to bother.