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Who would have thought it? Started on a whim, encouraged by Aric Press for ALM’s fledgling network of blogs, survivor of bitter opposition within Hildebrandt, unsure of its focus or style or reception or longevity, awkward in its use of technology for blogging, somehow this blog has kept calm and carried on.

Seven years and today thousands of readers every week, few known to me but everywhere I go. “Oh, Rees, I read your blog!”

Seven years of averaging more than five posts every two days, rain or shine.

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The General Counsel of Allstate, Michele Coleman Mayes, gave an interview to Metropolitan Corporate Counsel, Feb. 2012 at 1. Introducing herself, Mayes said “Our legal department is the fifth largest in the country, with approximately 500 lawyers representing our insureds and 130 attorneys dedicated to other matters.” She counts so-called staff counsel in her total.

Her claim about ranking fifth set me wondering so I consulted ALM’s In-House Law Departments at the Top 500 Companies (2012). Allstate was number 89 on Fortune’s list for 2011. After GE and my own data from this blog, I have listed below some of the largest law departments that have their number of lawyers stated in the ALM book (shown in parenthesis).

General Electric (See my post of May 23, 2007: General Electric and its 1,225 lawyers.).

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Of the departments participating in ALM’s metrics survey last year, 68 provided data on how many law firms they had retained in 2010 and how many they had retained in 2009. Among that group, contrary to all the talk about dramatic reductions in the number of law firms retained, their aggregate number reported declined from 4,333 firms in total to 4,027 – a decrease of less than 10 percent. Looking deeper, 30 departments decreased their outside counsel rolls, 18 reported the same number of firms, and 17 increased. Obviously, even with the group that stayed the same, there could have been different firms retained but the same total number.

Another perspective is to calculate the law firms retained per billion dollars of revenue. For this group of law departments in the United States, the median was 12 law firms retained for each billion dollars of revenue. The overall data reflects 3.5 law firms retained for every in-house lawyer. To learn more about the Law Department Metrics Benchmark Survey of ALM Legal Intelligence, click here for ALM’s website.

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I have commented before on the amount of information Legal Suite makes public, in striking contrast to the close-mouthed approach of other matter management vendors (See my post of Jan. 27, 2012: revenue, specific users, installed base.). The company’s newsletter this month had more detail.

“Heading towards the 400th customer?

Now in its 12th year of operation, the group [Legal Suite] will celebrate in the spring its 400th client. After Unilever France, the 100th client in 2004, RATP Group, the 200th client in 2007, Natixis group, the 300th client in 2010, 2012 will celebrate our 400th client.”

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It is well recognized that internal law department costs consist mostly of compensation and benefits. The data from ALM’s latest metrics collection corroborates that belief. In fact, it comes up higher than some general rules of thumb. Based on the numbers reported by about 70 U.S. legal departments, 86 percent of their internal spend went to the direct people costs of salaries, bonuses, equity awards, and benefits.

For every $21 of compensation and benefits spent, $1 (about 5%) was spent on occupancy costs and $37 dollars on comp for every technology dollar (about 3%). “Other” was 8% – perhaps CLE, travel, lawyer conferences, subscriptions, expert witnesses, consultants and the like. To learn more about the Law Department Metrics Benchmark Survey of ALM Legal Intelligence, click here for ALM’s website.

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This year’s survey is officially OPEN! Click on this precious link to complete your response. You will relish the streamlined questionnaire, 26+ industries, five releases, medians for 25 key metrics, and the zero cost.

For your industry to be well represented, please forward this post by e-mail to your colleagues and peers. Make some noise, fans, and help GCM get 1,000 participants!

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A.C. Grayling, Ideas that Matter: the concepts that shape the 21st century (Basic Books 2010) presents the venerable British philosopher’s summaries of 130 major concepts. Most covered in 2-3 pages, approximately 30 of them have already appeared on this blog.

One that has not is accommodation theory, devised in the early 1970s by Howard Giles. “Accommodation theory states that when people talk to each other, they adjust their behavior and manner of speech to take account of (to accommodate themselves to) the topic, the circumstances, and the other people engaged with them in the conversation” (at 2).

Grayling observes that the theory sounds simple on its surface, but he claims it gives profound insights into how miscommunication and misinterpretation can happen, such as within the legal departments and with clients and outside counsel. The theory has to do with information transmission. Whether the topic belongs in Grayling’s list is a hard question. Whether it can guide general counsel is an easier question.

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Twenty-nine colleges or universities use the fixed fee retainer program of the National Center for Higher Education Risk Management (NCHERM). Corp. Counsel, Feb. F012 at 20, reports on this unusual arrangement where legal services are outsourced. The founder of NCHERM offers colleges legal advice, training programs and expert witness services for a flat fee.

The founder estimates that 50-to-60% of colleges and universities don’t have their own in-house lawyers (See my post of Aug. 28, 2005: trade group for university counsel; and April 8, 2007: first university patent department: University of Virginia’s.). The arrangement does not prohibit clients from retaining other law firms for specialized matters. There are plenty of rent-a-GC organizations but this is the first one I’ve run into that focuses on an industry segment and has grown so large.

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If you’re reading this and your company sells software, help the rest of us with a comment. What are the differences between these five terms? Some connotations for me are below but many distinctions and definitions elude me, not to mention there may be other terms that deserve to be on the list..

“Programs” are almost elemental, a notch above “code.” Code is the set of instructions written so that a central processing unit, once the code is compiled (if that is necessary), can do something. The term program sounds out-of-date now. “Let’s license a program so CPM can emulate DOS.”

An “application” does a narrower range of things and is very practical. “We wrote an application to print address envelopes for FOIA requests to the EPA.” Today, “apps” abound for mobile devices.

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How contracts are managed by legal departments is one of the topics covered by Exari’s white paper, Corporate Counsel Contracts Survey Report, Dec. 2011 at 12. A column chart shows the results from approximately 100 legal departments. Given four choices regarding the percentages of the techniques they use to manage contracts, the departments reported the following: paper filing (45% checked it), network drives (52%), spreadsheets (17%), and “contract management systems” (about 30%). The numbers add up to more than 100 because, I presume, respondents were allowed to check more than one and they use more than one technique.

As scanning becomes more routine, I assume paper filing will diminish. Even so, for years to come companies will want to keep the original of important signed contracts.

What struck me from this data is that contract management software appears to be more common in legal departments than matter management software (See my post of March 1, 2011: estimates something like 2,500 out of 25,000 US legal departments use such software.). Perhaps the term “system” implies something broader than a software program. Some people use the word system to convey an entire organizational process with an array of integrated tools and methods and practices (See my post of Feb. 5, 2012: list of 39 contract management offerings sent on request.). Perhaps the respondents who completed the survey were predisposed toward contract management.