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Having a big dog in the fight, as a compiler of law department benchmarks on staffing and spending, it’s gratifying to find others who struggle against the darkness that devalues management metrics. As more data about processes and outcomes in corporate law departments become available, it will become clear that evidence-supplemented management surpasses instinct, anecdote, fingers crossed, and selective memory. Hence, it was exciting to read in Law Tech. News, June 2012 at 54, about some instances of quantitative legal prediction in the law.

LTN quotes Daniel Katz, an assistant professor at Michigan State University College of Law, who has done research on statistics and legal data. katzd@law.msu.edu The article also dwells on the Real Rate Report of CT TyMetrix and possible extensions of that company’s initiative (See my post of June 2, 2010: hourly rates of US partners from the Report; June 3, 2010: “standard billing rate” is illusory; Jan. 19, 2012: U.S. litigation firms charged a blended rate of $385 an hour; Jan. 23, 2012: clear data on the rising rates of law firms as they grow larger; and Jan. 19, 2012: gaps between average billing rates of U.S. litigation associates and partners.).

The article then moves to the Harlan Institute which analyzes Supreme Court decisions and allows crowd-sourcing predictions about upcoming decisions (See my post of March 22, 2011: crowd-sourcing game to review invoices.). Lex Machina, a spin-off from the Stanford University IP Litigation Clearinghouse, gets some coverage as it has organized and scrubbed data from 128,000 IP cases, 134,000 attorney records, 1,399 judges and other data from the past decade. Joshua Walker, the co-founder of Lex Machina, explains that the database is available for public interest research and for a fee.

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The Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) has made available a contract-drafting tool with four primary features. As described more fully by Robert Ambrogi in LTN Law Tech. News, June 2012 at 36, Contract Advisor has model contracts, with a group of ten to start from. It also has a clause library organized by agreement and clause type, along with a tool to compare your contract with a Contract Advisor contract. Fourth, there are source documents available at the ACC website.

Contract Advisor is available online and it is powered by kiiac www.kiiac.com (See my post of April 19, 2010: Michael Mills refers to Kiiac and Kingsley Martin, its founder.).

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On the last page of NJBiz’s special issue, General Counsel of the Year Awards (2012), Heartland Payment Systems placed an ad honoring Charles Kallenbach, its General Counsel. At the top, the full-page ad says “Congratulations to Charles Kallenbach for receiving the highest honor ever bestowed upon a human being by the nation’s top business magazine.” [I can’t do strike-throughs on this blog platform, so imagine the bold words marked out]

That touch of hyperbole is struck through and this follows: “Congratulations to Charles Kallenbach for receiving the highest honor ever.” It too is crossed out.

Finally, in the middle of the page, there remains “Congratulations” and under it, in much smaller type is “(Sorry Charles, our legal department had to approve this.)”

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General Counsel Metrics will offer Industry Analyses starting after the second release of its global benchmark survey in July. Each of the 25 Industry Analyses available offers deeper insights than the no-cost, 60-page Standard Report.

I strongly believe that general counsel should look only at benchmark metrics from companies in their own industry (See my post of March 28, 2011: an example of why industry benchmarks provide by far the most useful insights; Dec. 27, 2010: large benchmark surveys can present “sector” data; and Jan. 3, 2011: absolute numbers of staff, even by industry, afford little insight.).

Since my first metapost on industries in relation to benchmarks, I have added the three in the preceding paragraph plus 11 more (See my post of March 2, 2010: industry benchmarks with 8 references.). Some address an index I have created called “legal intensity” (See my post of Aug. 3, 2010: differences in legal intensity of industries do not cause assessments of primary firms to vary much; Dec. 1, 2010: 20 industries ranked by “legal efficiency”; Dec. 31, 2010: rankings of industries by benchmark metrics and participation rates in survey; April 12, 2011: legal intensity and the competitive level in an industry; and Oct. 31, 2011: industry intensity revisited one year later.).

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It is always easier to predict exciting revolutions, sturm und drang, a brave new world, such as in the relations between law departments and the law firms they retain. Seers get invited to conferences, enjoy their names in headlines, relish being quoted – and they might even, sometimes, be prescient. But after the failure of Lehman Brothers threw the U.S. economy into cardiac arrest, despite many forecasts of upheaval in the corporate legal industry, the following years didn’t witness heart-stopping change.

I invite your comments here or by email regarding in the National Law Journal, contrarian to its core. It leads with stable benchmarks and then offers four broad reasons why a much quieter period followed than had been trumpeted.

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My law school alma mater, Columbia (JD ’78), took steps after the 2008 crash to help its graduates find jobs. According to the Col. Law School Mag., Spring 2012 at 2, the Dean of the Law School “reached out to more than 100 graduates who are general counsels or deputy general counsels to encourage them to hire graduates straight out of law school, which is not common.” It worked. Through that effort, about five percent of the Class of 2011 and four percent of the Class of 2010 were hired by a legal department. The Law School graduates something like 350 lawyers every year, so 10-15 of its graduates each of those two years started their practice in a law department.

That is an unusual career path, especially from a very prominent law school (See my post of Nov. 8, 2005: how infrequently law departments hire straight from law school; June 24, 2007: few hires straight from law school; Sept. 18, 2008: innovative arrangement for law school graduates to get law firm training before joining Citigroup; March 9, 2009: about 4 percent go straight to a legal department; Oct. 5, 2009: GCs should encourage law students to consider in-house jobs; and Oct. 19, 2011: IBM hires straight from law school.).

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An article that criticizes the rigidity and wastefulness of forced hourlong sit-down meetings appears in Bloomberg BusinessWeek, June 11, 2012 at 51. Almost by definition, one hour allows too much time for the issue at hand or it cuts off discussion and deliberation – it is rigid. Often, much of the time what is being discussed has little value to one or more of the attendees, or the meeting is poorly structured, or the right people are neither present nor prepared – the meeting is wasteful. Regularly scheduled meetings exacerbate both drawbacks.

For law departments, some of the ideas in the article could be usefully implemented. Like cc’s on e-mails, limit how many people can be invited to a meeting. Pick a day where no one schedules meetings (like the e-mail free days). Use software that helps organize and supplement meetings. Flex the duration of meetings; have attendees stand for a portion. Always set agendas in proportion to the importance of a project and always end with specific to-do’s for attendees.

Finally, for the cost ticking away, project a small under the clock that shows the cost per hour to the company of the meeting. If a law department knows that its fully-loaded cost per lawyer hour is $210, it would not be hard to calculate the accumulated cost every 15 minutes based on who is in the room.

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Inspired by an article in the Economist, June 9, 2012 at 83, on using McDonalds Big Macs to compare international productivity trends and improve on purchase power parity (PPP), I imagined a counterpart for legal services rendered to corporations.

Ten general counsel in each of ten developed nations agree to contribute data. They estimate the fees and disbursements paid a representative, good quality law firm in their country through completion of a (a) single-plaintiff employment discrimination case, (b) lease of a standard office suite in the capital, (c) routine securities filing for a publicly traded company, and (d) a cash purchase agreement of a small company. The goal would be to collect estimates of ordinary, common-as-Big Mac legal services. Combined, that data would permit an index of corporate legal services for each country.

The other piece of data would be the salary plus bonus of a typical law firm lawyer who has been practicing five years. That data would be the equivalent of what McDonalds pays its employees.

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The settlements that reach the press, those covered by 8K filings or news releases, may well account for the largest part of corporate settlements paid (See my post of April 15, 2007: confidentiality of settlement amounts.). I presume this to be true since a single blockbuster settlement easily overshadows lots of small, nuisance payments. Shareholders must be informed about material payments and the resolution of significant litigation. On the other hand, many companies year after year have no settlements that rise to that level of financial significance or they have no legal requirement to disclose settlements.

It would be good to have some benchmarks around this topic. Perhaps general counsel would be willing to estimate the ratio over the past couple of years for their company of disclosed-to-confidential amounts (See my post of Sept. 22, 2006: 95 percent of settlements are in cash.). Also there are some settlement databases (See my post of March 13, 2006: verdict and settlement databases.).

I have tried to bring some visibility to the question of how much is paid in settlements by companies in the United States, but the bits of data are fragmented (See my post of May 30, 2005: lack of benchmark data about settlements; July 16, 2005: settlements as a percentage of total legal spend; Feb. 13, 2008: settlement ratios by practice area; July 16, 2005: settlements and judgments in relation to outside counsel spending; Jan. 20, 2009: settlement costs in relation to costs of outside counsel; and Oct. 27, 2010: data on settlements.).

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A provider of SaaS-based IP management technology, First To File®, launched this month an IP Document Management Survey to gather information from corporations and IP law firms on this genre of software. One question listed eight reasons why a law department might invest in such a system.

The survey asks respondents who have a Document Management Solution (DMS) or are considering one for their top three reasons for moving to it. It’s a good list, so I have reproduced it below.

Cost savings

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