Wonk that I am, to find a different approach to gather and present data gives me a glow. So, when I dug into the PwC Annual Corporate Directors Survey, I glowed. I fastened onto its methodology for the question on topics board members would like to devote more time to…
“Consulting companies that study information consumption routinely find that more than half of all standard reports aren’t being used by anyone anymore.” This damning statement comes from MIT Sloan Mgt. Rev., Spring 2011 at 57. Most law departments of much size spawn reports on such things as monthly spending, headcount,…
My latest InsideCounsel column, which went up on May 2, 2011, talks about a congenial way to explain portions of wholes, such as how many lawsuits out of all our lawsuits cost more than $100,00 to defend last year. So-called natural frequencies are less off-putting than percentages or decimals. The…
I like numbers; I like observations about numbers; so I like these quotes and the ideas they stimulated. Let’s hope you like my aphoristic style. “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” Albert Einstein (1) More value generated by a law departments…
General Counsel Metrics, LLC, has prepared Release 1.0 of its report on law department spending and staffing metrics. The 245 law departments reported 6,527 lawyers at the end of 201, with a median of 8. The legal staff in those departments, which includes paralegals and all others, totaled 5,574, with…
Even with large numbers of participants, such as 1,000 in the General Counsel Metrics law department survey, benchmark metrics probably reflect more centralized law departments than decentralized. Not just more of them, because centralized reporting departments – where all practicing lawyers report ultimately to the general counsel – greatly outnumber…
Covering 240 participants or so to this point, the 2010 data on key benchmark metrics will be quite rich. Lumen Legal is hosting a webinar for me to explain the findings and discuss law department benchmark metrics more generally. If you would like to sign up to dial in, at…
The Center for Studies on Economic and Social Law (CEDES), a Brazilian think tank, has sponsored a competition. “[T]he winners will be granted access to the litigation portfolios of five global companies with presence in Brazil, the United States and Europe. Winners will assess and compare the causes for litigation…
If members of a law department vote choose contending law firms, vendors, software packages, offsite choices, or anything else, they ought to bear in mind that the winning outcome could be within a range of random statistical error. In other words, if the vote were held repeatedly, without any of…
If you calculate the average billing rate increase of the two law firms you paid the most during 2009 and 2010, and then divide the total of those increases by two, you have the arithmetic mean of those increases. So, Firm A increased 4 percent and firm B increased 6…