Law Department Management Blog
“Each US corporate counsel handles an average of 10.2 litigation matters,” proclaims Fulbright & Jaworski’s Second Annual Litigation Trends Survey (at 19). lawsuits a year. The F&J report claims that “companies with revenues of $1 billion-plus have an average of over [litigation management] 10 lawyers.” (id). That may be the average in their group of 103 large companies, but 75 percent had five or fewer litigation management lawyers, so the median was closer to four (Full data at 55).
Other surveys show a typical staff of around five lawyers per billion of revenue, and typically less than one of them – on a full-time basis – manages litigation. Hence, if four litigation matters per lawyer according to the estimated median, that would work out to a median of around 20 lawsuits a year (and perhaps half that number at any one time – see my earlier post.)