Litigation - How to Avoid an Antitrust Lawsuit if in Your Benchmarking Practices.   

Benchmarking companies engage in collection and analysis of detailed business information in a data warehouse.  Normally, they analyze the data for comparing your detailed business information against the results of other companies that show similar business characteristics.   If several companies in the same industry delegate industry-based benchmarking to a single benchmarking company, they could be in violation of the law, depending on how the data is collected. See http://www.outsourcing-law.com/Computing_On_Demand/benchmarking.htm.