In-House Counsel

A metric for corporate secretary functions: cost per entity maintained

By Rees Morrison

Every law department or corporate-secretary function can establish how many corporate entities they maintain around the world. Both can determine, at least approximately, the costs in time ? at fully-loaded hourly rates ? and other expenses ? such as the fees of corporate services companies or specialized software (See my post of April 22, 2007 for comments on specialized software for the function.). Those costs of entity maintenance divided by the number of entities generates a benchmark metric: cost per entity maintained.

Such a metric has not come to my attention and I would welcome hearing from readers any guidance on ranges for it. Come to think of it, I do not know a median number of corporate entities per billion dollars of revenue, or the drivers of that number by industry or company size. Most tellingly, is the benchmark meaningful? Can you do something to alter it? After all, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde?s quip, you can know the benchmark for everything, but the importance of nothing.

Full post as published by Law Department Management on February 04, 2008 (boomark / email).