Whether you want to think of it as comparing scorecards, scouting the competition, or simply using data to improve your own operations, benchmarking should be common practice in corporate legal departments.
Take, for example, the 2019 Global Legal Department Benchmarking Report, which surveyed over 500 legal departments. It found that, on average, corporate legal departments spend $9.7 million on outside legal services, which represents about half of their overall spend. Data points like these can help legal departments assess how they stack up against peers.
