In 2001, FMC Corp. had 48 lawyers and $3.9 billion in revenue. It spun off FMC Technologies as a $1.9 billion company — but that company had only eight attorneys. The larger company, with 12.3 lawyers per billion of revenue, spawned a company with 4.2 lawyers per billion!
Even more astonishing, by the end of 2005 FMC technologies had grown to $3.2 billion but still had only eight attorneys, which meant an even skinnier 2.5 lawyers per billion of revenue! According to Counsel to Counsel, Nov. 2006 at 10, one reason this ultra-lean staffing meets the needs of its clients is that each lawyer has responsibility for one business unit as well as a specialty shared across business units (See my post of Dec. 21, 2005 about Ascential Software’s major/minor system.).
It would be interesting to know equivalent figures for other spin offs, such as Lucent from AT&T, and then Avaya from Lucent.