Where do you get your benchmark data?
As a legal manager, your performance is judged in a variety of ways. Often the satisfaction of your internal clients is decisive, and rightly so. But most legal managers we talk to also want to know how their department is doing compared to others.
When you say "compare," you say "benchmark”. Benchmarking is the process of numerically comparing the performance of your legal department to others, usually with the goal of improvement.
But where do you get your benchmark data? There are companies who sell it, but the costs of those reports are substantial, so the average Dutch General Counsel isn’t to keen on them. So most of us revert to the 'source of all wisdom': Google. There you find a lot of data, most of which originates from the US and UK market. One of the best known and most cited in the world is the annual report of the American Association of Corporate Counsel, the ACC report. The most recent dates from earlier this year. The salient points, as far as we are concerned, are:
4% shift from outside counsel spend, to inside spend. Ergo, do more yourself and outsource less.
Even though there is less outsourcing, corporates are working with more different firms. So there is an increase in the number of legal service providers used.
The more one spends on outside legal services, the more providers one uses.
90% of outside spend involves law firms. Alternative providers, so-called ALSPs play only a small role.
No shocking developments compared to a year earlier. But it’s a pity these Anglo-Saxon numbers have a limited applicability for Dutch companies. That is because the American and Dutch markets are totally different. A lot of the ACC data doesn’t apply here.
As an alternative, you can have a look at the benchmark survey of General Counsel Netherlands, the Dutch club of general counsel. They have recently started publishing data on the dutch market from a general counsel perspective. You can find the 2022 version here. This GCN report is interesting in itself, but you will also find relatively few figures on external legal spend in the Netherlands. We are not talking about percentages of external vs. internal costs, but simply the rates paid for legal services in the different fields of law. Something our clients are interested in.
If you work structurally with the LawyerlinQ platform to put out RFPs to the law firms you work with, you basically create your own benchmark every time. But not everyone has adopted our platform yet, and many organizations are ken to know the rates of other firms, compared to what their panel firms are charging them.
That is why this year, at the request of clients, we have started experimenting with a benchmark study specifically aimed at mapping attorney fees. Insights we can only share with participants, but if you find this topic interesting, please send an email to benchmarkstudy@lawyerlinq.com and we will invite you to the next one.
