The big-three law department metrics hold in a survey of small law departments

The Small Law Department Compensation Survey, conducted in the summer of 2008 by ACC and Empsight, collected responses from 337 organizations. The average revenue of the companies was $500 million with the median revenue of $152 million. A year or so ago I published an article about these three metrics.

Staff: Even among this smaller size group, where there is at least one attorney the ratio of one lawyer to one non-lawyer holds. Most law departments hit a balance of approximately equal staff numbers.

Revenue Supported: Attorneys per $100 million of revenue is equal to 1.1 (median) which works out to 4.4 lawyers per billion. This benchmark metric (plus or minus a lawyer) holds fairly well for most law departments.

Spend: The US legal spending per million is $5,481 (median) which translates as 0.55 percent of revenue. That figure is representative for many US legal departments.