Law Department Management Blog
The “world rank” of this blog, Phi Beta Blogga, and other memorabilia. According to SiteLogr.com, on February 11th, the “world rank” was 1,256,081. Now that the applause has died down, it can also be revealed that this site placed an “Estimated Value” of $1,353 on my pride and joy and estimated reasonably accurately that “Visits Per Day” was 618. According to HubSpot’s Website Grader on Jan. 22, 2010, this blog had a Google Page Rank of 4 (PR 4) and its traffic rank according to Alexa is in the top 4.916 percent of all sites (1,528,666 rank). “Inbound Links” number 3,826. My “Blog Grade” is 94 (Phi Beta Blogga), which is “based on a measurement of traffic levels to your blog and the number and quality of links pointing at it.”
Are there tens of thousands of law departments in the world? Michael Bond wrote me on LinkedIn on Feb. 9th. “It is mandatory to belong the Belgian In-house Counsel Association; they have 1,300 members. The population is 10m so multiply by 30 [to match the 310 million or so population of the US and] you have about 40,000 in-house.” I do not know whether Belgian lawyers in government agencies are also required to belong to the Association.
One out of seven lawyers in Fortune 500 legal departments are women. Legal Tech. News, Feb. 2010 at 29, reports that “14% of Fortune 500 in-house counsel are women.” I would have thought the percentage was much higher. Many legal departments I advise seem to be closer to 30-40 percent women lawyers.
Reporting lines in the UK for compliance, company secretary, corporate governance and ethics. “Nearly 40% of respondents state that the general counsel is directly responsible for the compliance function. In 23% of companies the compliance function reports to the general counsel.” It may be that compliance is part of the legal department for the larger percentage, but in a separate unit reporting to the general counsel in the smaller percentage. The benchmarking survey of legal risk and compliance, prepared in early 2009 and published by the Practical Law Company, gathered responses from 69 companies. www.practicallaw.com/lawdepartment