In-House Counsel

The Hartford Financial Services Group won Corporate Counsel?s 2009 Best Legal Department award. It has 210 in-house lawyers supporting 2008 revenue of $9.2 billion. Further, ?All firms that do a significant amount of [litigation] work for the company are assigned in-house ?relationship managers.? Similar to relationship partners at law firms, about 40 of [its] 56 [litigation] lawyers play this role.? These facts come from Corp. Counsel, Vol. 16, June 2009 at 66. My reflections:

a) At more than 21 lawyers for every billion dollars of revenue, Hartford is off the customary charts. By comparison, the same issue states that Exelon?s $18.8 billion in revenue rests on 59 lawyers ? 3.1 lawyers per billion and IBM?s $103.6 billion rests on 580 lawyers ? 5.6 lawyers per billion.

b) Litigation lawyers account for almost one out of three Hartford lawyers, which seems quite high (See my post of April 11, 2009: distribution of specialty lawyers; Nov. 22, 2007: practice-area metrics for litigators; and Aug. 27, 2005: about one litigation lawyer per ten inside lawyers.).

c) About 80 percent of the company?s litigation lawyers manage outside counsel (See my post of May 21, 2008: surmise that less than half of inside lawyers in medium-size departments manage outside counsel.).

d) A high percentage of Hartford litigation lawyers act in the capacity of responsible for one or more relationships with outside counsel (See my post of July 8, 2009: responsible lawyers and their pros and cons.).