Litigation staff as a proportion of law department staff

A recent post of mine (August 21, 2005) cited a general counsel who contends that the last step you want to take to reduce litigation costs is to hire a litigation lawyer. He favors letting business lawyers, assisted by outside counsel, resolve claims and lawsuits.

A number of blogs picked up on that item, so I looked for metrics on the frequency of litigators in law departments. My benchmark book and some other research suggests that as a general rule, law departments that have more than ten lawyers have approximately one litigation staff person – the person might be a paralegal helping with discovery – for every 13-16 law department employees.