Law department productivity as measured by total legal spending to revenue

Those who analyze the comparative performances of different law departments could treat the benchmark metric of total legal spending (TLS) per unit of revenue as a productivity metric. Among a group of companies whose businesses are roughly comparable, the law department with a lower ratio of TLS to revenue is to that degree more productive.

The lower the ratio, the more revenue a given legal investment helps generate. One company with 0.35 percent of revenue spent on legal affairs delivers legal services more efficiently than a peer whose ratio is 0.45 percent. More precisely, the first company is about 30 percent more legally productive.