The NJ Law Journal published its “2011 Directory of In-House Counsel.” It lists 1,944 individual names. It lists them on 55 pages by company, but does not state the number of companies (i.e., law departments). To calculate that, I counted the number of companies on every other page for the…
As I watch last year’s participants in the General Counsel Metrics benchmark survey return to the fold this year, I have wondered why some do not. Several possible explanations have occurred to me. These reasons, other than the first one about cost, apply generally to my efforts as well as…
Bill Henderson, Director of the Center on the Global Legal Profession and a Professor of Law at Maurer School of Law, co-authored an article in the ABA J., July 2011 at 41. The authors write that “over the last 25 years government data shows legal services constitute a slightly larger…
“On average, in France, approximately 350 new patent cases are initiated every year in first instance [trial courts] and 110 appeals are lodged.” I knew from that sentence in FocusEurope, Summer 2011 at 54, that good metrics lay ahead in an ad by Véron & Associés. C’est vrai. Based on…
The second release has 317 participants from 23 countries grouped into 21 industries. Somewhat more than half of them are headquartered in the United States. One quarter of the participants reported revenue below $500 million. One quarter reported revenue greater than $5.8 billion. The median revenue was $1.5 billion. The…
An article on requests for proposal in the ACC Docket, June 2011 at 74, states that hourly rate arrangements are more and more giving way to metrics “to assess efficiency and effectiveness.” The metric proffered is “percentage of work handled by partners and associates, respectively.” I am at a loss…
Benford’s law, named after statistician Frank Benford, holds that in most lists of numbers from real life, the digits in the first place should occur according to a known table of probabilities. For example, the digit 1 should occur 30.1 percent of the time as the right-most digit, the digit…
The ubiquitous David Cambria said this during a SuperConference panel and I got to thinking what he means. Partly he means that if you look back at numbers, that is more limiting than when you project numbers forward. But projection (modeling) does rely on historical numbers. The distinction blurs to…
A handicap for many managers of in-house legal teams, when they want to make sense out of a mass of data, is that they do not understand statistical tools well enough. Aside from learning them on their own, they might look around their corporation to find someone who already knows…
Two previous posts have shared analyses of the matter management systems of participants in this year’s General Counsel Metrics survey (See my post of June 13, 2011: leading systems by number of departmental users; and June 14, 2011: comparison of leading systems to non-users on total legal spending.). The 142…