Four developing trends under way will in the near future add much more punch and usefulness to benchmark reports of law departments. Put briefly and then expanded on below, these trends are dramatically larger numbers of participants in surveys, data visualization and info-graphics, rapid personalized analysis, and proprietary figures enriched with public disclosures. As their privilege of budgets only mildly monitored disappears, general counsel will have to account increasingly for their spending and headcount. They will be asked to show how their corporate investment in legal resources compares with that of peers. Sophisticated benchmarks, as these four trends advance, will come to their rescue.
Thousands of participating law departments. As to the first trend, the day will soon be upon us when more than 1,000 legal departments provide data for a single survey. It will be a dramatic upgrade from the 100 to 200 companies that have constituted the relatively puny collections on offer until now; last year, one survey amassed more than 800 law department participants. Surveys that top 1,000 will be available soon. Pressure from chief executive officers, improved survey methodologies, zero cost to take part, wider appreciation of the usefulness of benchmarks, and heightened awareness of law department management will boost participation, greatly. With the jump in participation, benchmark analyses and comparisons will become much more fine-grained, reliable, and persuasive. For that matter, comparisons between law departments of different countries will be achievable for the first time. In general, the level of statistical analysis that is possible from a large pool — make that a lake — of legal departments means that much more will be learned from benchmarking.
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