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    • Technorati Profile Creative Commons License This blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

    « New document assembly offering online, at no cost (WhichDraft.com) | Main | Unusual expenses ineligible to be billed according to outside counsel guidelines »

    Free benchmark report; total legal spend per regional lawyer compared for EMEA and Asia-Pacific

    Email me if you would like a copy of the 2009 Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) benchmark survey or the Asia-Pacific (APAC) survey. Compiled by Laurence Simons, legal recruiters, and Rees Morrison, they cover 123 EMEA legal departments and 57 APAC departments, respectively.

    Total legal spend in APAC per APAC lawyer came in at a median of $473,787. For EMEA, using an exchange rate of 1.3 dollars per Euro, the median was $646,787 (€497,529). Thus, inside plus external costs in APAC were approximately three-quarters of those in EMEA.

    If your legal department in one of those two regions has a figure higher than the median figure, it could suggest:

    1. You may have a higher ratio of support staff per lawyer than other companies
    2. Your internal compensation is higher than that of other companies. Look at factors such as cost of living (where your lawyers are based), your lawyers’ seniority, and the compensation scheme
    3. Your management of outside counsel costs may not be as sharp and robust as other law departments
    4. You may have some costs in your legal budget that other law departments omit, such as patent annuities or Board fees
    5. The lead time between legal investments and revenue as well as the lag time between revenue and legal issue complicated this metric.

    Posted on October 22, 2009 at 09:55 AM | Permalink

    Comments

    Feed You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

    Rees, this is indeed very interesting data. Were you able to discern any impact on average cost resulting from decisions to outsource or offshore legal work? And also, to what extent did the per lawyer cost vary with the number of lawyers; for example, if I employ less of them, does it mean I save money, or do I just spend more on average per lawyer because I depend on more external support?

    Posted by: Tim Cummins | Dec 8, 2009 6:47:39 AM

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