Legal Marketing & PR

Billion Dollar Lawyers - Want A Legal Job Like This?

By lawjobspipeline

I received some advance warning about a report prepared by a number of ‘authority figures’ in the legal analytis business who are shortly to publish a ‘Benchmarking’ report on the practices - and revenues - flowing through Australian and New Zealand corporate law departments.  The column appears in this weeks ‘National Business Review’ and in the NBR ‘Briefcase’ blog shown on LawFuel.

You might be forgiven for thinking of this part of the world as somewhat less extravagent in the legal spending stakes, and you’d generally be correct, however the fact that one billion dollars was spent by the 100+ respondents in the report is somewhat eyewatering.  In fact, around three quarters of the respondents (in government and private practice) reported annual expenditure of over $1 million.

What’s interesting from the as yet unreleased report, is that most of the complex legal work is outsourced and none of the legal departments saw any decrease in size over coming years. 

We’ll have more on this report, which is in many ways a microcosm of exactly what’s occurring in other jurisdictions.  It looks at the level of time recording, hours worked, job satisfaction and the relative position of inhouse legal work vis-a-vis the “outhouse” legal work.  Where to go?  What to do?  These are question law candidates query, but the volume and extent - and power - of the inhouse lawyer is not something that is going to go away any time soon.  The reverse, we think.

Full post as published by Lawyer Marketing Blog on March 06, 2008 (boomark / email).