Dive Brief:
- A survey of 427 legal departments found that the median number of team members is six individuals, though larger companies with more revenue feature far bigger legal teams.
- On average, two-thirds of legal department personnel are lawyers, according to the 2022 Law Department Management Benchmarking Report released by the Association of Corporate Counsel and Major, Lindsey & Africa.
- While legal operations is a growing field, such professionals only make-up 5% of legal department staff on average, according to the report featuring information from organizations spanning 24 industries and 26 countries.
Dive Insight:
Legal departments have been very busy in recent years amid rapidly changing public health and economic conditions, but most continue to operate quite leanly in terms of personnel.
For instance, the median legal staff of six individuals identified in the 2022 legal benchmarking report matched the figure for organizations that participated in last year’s edition.
The report highlights that staffing numbers vary significantly based on the size of a company.
Those companies with up to $1 billion in revenue typically employ three legal team members, and companies with up to $5 billion average 15 legal department staff.
On the high end, companies between $5 billion and $20 billion in revenue have a median of 59 staff and the largest companies with more than $20 billion in revenue average 98 staff.
Lawyers making up two-thirds of legal department personnel in 2022 matches the figure from the 2021 report.
Additionally, on average 12% of legal staff are paralegals, “other staff” comprise 9%, administrative staff represent 8% and legal operations professionals 5%.
The report also found that as a company increases in size, the percentage of lawyers in the legal department decreases and the percentage of paralegals increases.
For example, at companies with less than $1 billion in revenue, 70% of legal staff are lawyers and 11% are paralegals.
Meanwhile, at companies with more than $20 billion in revenue, the average percentage of lawyers is 53% and paralegals comprise 19% of the team.
“Large companies also employ a larger percentage of other staff than smaller organizations, while the share of legal operations and administrative professionals is more stable across different company sizes,” the report said.
Additionally, the report found that on average 78% of internal legal department spending goes toward in-house counsel compensation and 16% covers non-attorney staff compensation.
