Incisive Legal Intelligence has two fairly recent surveys that may be of interest to those of you who follow our blog with respect to national attorney hourly rates and in-house counsel costs. Here you go.
2009 Billings Rates and Practice Survey for Small and Mid-Sized Firms.
In its 2009 study on billing rates and practices in small and mid-sized firms, Incisive Legal Intelligence has tallied some interesting findings from a sample size of 255 nationwide firms with the largest group having an average of 21-40 lawyers.
This is what they found:
*The majority of firms bill by the hour, regardless of firm size.
*The average billing rate, nationwide, is $284 per hour.
*Firms with 2-8 lawyers have an average hourly billing rate of $262, firms with 76-150 lawyers increase to $295 per hour, and firms with over 150 lawyers have an average billable rate of $333.
*The average billing rate also increases with a lawyer’s number of years in practice, with lawyers in or near major metropolitan areas commanding much higher fees than the averages.
*By region, average hourly rates break out this way: Northeast — $319; West — $296; South — $276; and Midwest — $264.
*The Pacific division (California, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii, and Arizona) has higher billing rates with an average hourly billing rate of $319.
*The practice areas with the highest hourly billing rates are Plaintiffs’ Contingency Litigation ($413), followed by Labor/Employment ($302), General Law ($296), and Real Estate/Land Use ($294).
*A client can be expect to be charged hourly rates for paralegals and other support staff.
2008 Study on In-House.
In a 2008 Law Department Metrics Benchmarking Survey of 111 companies, Incisive Legal Intelligence reports that the median internal cost of operating an in-house law department at a large company grew to $381,618 per lawyer, a 10% increase over the previous survey year. Median external expenditures for large companies were up significantly, from $616,519 to $705,270 per lawyer. Corporate law departments participating in the study spent the highest percentage of outside counsel fees on litigation (37%), followed by intellectual property (15%) and then mergers and acquisitions (12%).
What are the primary criteria for selecting outside counsel? Answers in order of priority: firm specialization; responsiveness; and cost. For those companies evaluating outside counsel, here the the three top evaluation criteria: results; knowledge/experience; cost.