How Many In-house Lawyers Should Your Company Have?

The size of an organization’s legal team of course depends so much on the nature of your company, what you sell, and how you sell it.

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This said, let’s dive into the data from Pave’s customer base to uncover some benchmarks.

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Here, we’ll look at the benchmarks for full-time employees (FTEs) per legal team member, similar to the approach we took when analyzing data on HRBPs. 

Legal Team Size Benchmarks

Let’s look at the findings from 1,800+ analyzed Pave customers. This analysis considers all Legal Team Members, from IC attorneys all the way up to General Counsel. We also split up the results for private companies (with at least 100 employees) and public companies. As a reminder, Pave’s dataset skews heavily tech. 

The data shows us that at private companies with 100+ employees, the size of the legal team ranges from 63 full-time employees per legal employee at the 25th percentile all the way to 169 full-time employees per legal employee at the 75th percentile. The median sits at one lawyer for every 109 FTEs.

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At public companies, the legal team size is the same at the low end, with 63 full-time employees per legal employee at the 25th percentile. However, at the 75th percentile, these companies have 155 full-time employees per legal employee, and the median is 92 FTEs per legal employee.

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Key Factors Influencing Lawyer-to-FTE Ratios

There are a number of factors that can influence the size of a company’s legal team, or the lawyer-to-FTE ratio. Here are a few:

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• Company Size and Stage: Early-stage startups (sub ~100 full-time employees) typically have very few in-house lawyers and often rely on external legal firms.

• Product Complexity: Companies with more complex IP (e.g., SaaS companies, hardware companies) may require more legal support for patent protection, licensing agreements, etc.

• Global Presence: Companies expanding internationally will likely need more lawyers to handle local compliance, data privacy (e.g., GDPR), and employment laws across different regions.

• Legal Focus: Tech companies in highly regulated areas (e.g., health data, financial services, telecom) tend to have larger legal teams to address the regulatory complexity.

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