Is it possible to define what normal means? Is it good to be normal? Is it bad if you’re not?

Over the last year, LegalVIEW Insights—a series of research reports based on data mined out of the Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions Data Warehouse, the world’s largest body of legal performance data-- has shown what a “normal” corporate law department looks like on various dimensions such as number of vendors used, total spend/increase in spend, percentage of spend generated by matters >$1M in lifetime spend, and percentage of partner vs. associate time.

However, the research also showed that not every law department is “normal.”  In fact, in some ways, the research suggests that there may not be a traditional “normal,” with a wide variety of numbers seen on most metrics.  Is this good or bad?  Should corporate law departments and the law firms that serve them strive to be normal?  Because it is just as easy to make the argument that, in an industry with a reputation for being behind in…