Law Department Management Blog
For those of you who think that a law department needs to have some minimum number of lawyers to justify licensing a matter management system, you are right! But the number is one lawyer.
I looked at 125 law departments in the General Counsel Metrics benchmark survey that have licensed a law-department matter management system. Not a contract management system, or document management or patent tracking; not a customized system – I mean one offered by a vendor to law departments so that they can collect and report on data about the matters they handle and the fees they pay.
One department of one lawyer appeared; eight departments have two lawyers; 14 have three or four; ten have five or six; and two with seven. Given that the median law department in the 402 participating law departments so far is exactly 7, I stopped at the 35 smallest departments. Twenty-eight percent of the departments that named a legitimate matter management system were of the median size or smaller.
At the other end of the size spectrum, the 35th largest department using one of those packages had 51 lawyers, and the departments went up from there to the 100s of attorneys. The median number of lawyers for the entire group was 17.5.