Here’s CLOC’s latest research.

I have a few thoughts. It is an interesting report, but be careful. With 200+ participants, we can can have SOME faith in the generalizability of the findings, but with caveats.

Note that half of the participating companies not classified as “other” are either tech or financial services. If those aren’t your markets, these results may not be relevant to you.

Do not pay attention to any of the industry breakdowns (and quite a few are presented) except those two industries (tech and financial services) as the number of respondents for all others is 24 or fewer and most are in single digits. These charts may be hard to ignore, but really, the differences are probably noise.

Same with company size. These respondents tend to be from pretty big companies (most have revenues over $4.5B and annual legal spend over $11.7M). If that’s not your market, caveat emptor.

Statistics carried out to 2 or more significant figures (e.g., weighted average on a 1-5 scale = 3.79) are absolute nonsense with samples this small.

A study like this can be useful if you think of it as very qualitative/exploratory research and don’t pay much attention to the numbers. Look for overall conclusions and general trends and DO NOT look for differences by industry, company size, etc.

Again, if your client focus is not relatively large companies from tech and financial services, this research is probably not for you.