The Legal IT innovation group (LITIG) has just completed its second annual IT benchmarking exercise. Any law firm that is a member of LITIG can participate in the exercise which is done on an anonymous basis. By providing a fairly simple breakdown of their own staff headcount and IT costs each participating firm gets back an analysis of their own performance compared with the other unknown participants. This year 13 firms from the Lawyer top 100 participated.               

David Coates, IT Director of Bond Pearce, who coordinates the survey, said “In order to allow firms to compare their performance the raw data is converted into various KPIs allowing easy comparison such as IT spend as a % of turnover, IT staff as a % of total headcount, IT spend per staff, number of helpdesk calls per staff member, average IT salary etc. Averages for all firms for the financial years ‘05 and ‘06 are shown.”

“The survey showed some interesting changes in spend from the previous year such as average IT spend per fee earner rose sharply by around 15% to just over £5,500 while overall IT running costs as a percentage of turnover was largely unchanged at 4% (excl. depreciation). Average IT salaries increased by some 4.5% while most firms had moderate success in their goal of improving the fee earner to secretarial ratio which moved from 2.3 to 2.5.

IT capital spend varied dramatically year on year for individual firms showing that investment in technology can still be ‘lumpy’ and cyclical.

Stuart Whittle, Partner and Head of IT at Weightmans, commented "For relatively little effort on my part, I found the ability to benchmark my firm's IT spend to be invaluable, particularly in the context of looking at our long term IT Strategy.  The timing of this year's exercise was fortuitous as the results were available in advance of the presentation of my proposed IT strategy to the firm’s Strategy Board and have been a key part of the financial discussions surrounding that strategy."

The LITIG IT benchmarking program is available to any member firm who elects to participate and is done at no cost to participants. The program will be repeated again around November based on the latest financial year. For more information on joining LITIG see www.litig.org