To find out whether lawyers per thousand employees makes any difference in total legal spending. I took data from 39 US and Canadian manufacturing companies that participated in the General Counsel Metrics benchmark survey last year. For each I calculated the number of lawyers they had per thousand employees –…
The Litigation Cost Survey of Major Companies, presented at the Searle Center on Law, Regulation, and Economic Growth, (Northwestern Univ. School of Law, May 10-11, 2010), can tutor all of us who do surveys of law departments. Several of the steps it took conform to what I believe are solid…
Normal bell-curve distributions of data produce a skewness statistic – the left or right spread of the data – of about zero. The more skewness is positive the more the data bunches toward the low end of the range, the more negative if it bunches at the higher end. Values…
A report entitled the Litigation Cost Survey of Major Companies, presented at the Searle Center on Law, Regulation, and Economic Growth, (Northwestern Univ. School of Law, May 10-11, 2010) at 7, gives data on expenses of about 48 major law departments. The report includes a graph that shows “Average US…
Mathematics does so much, yet on this blog the total number of actual equations cited has so far only reached eight. Since we all count on equations for insights with metrics, I have collected them. Here is the list of my blog posts with equations (See my post of Nov.…
I have been thinking about indices, by which term I mean collections of metrics that combine to form a single measure. Everyone knows the Consumer Price Index: the aggregated and weighted prices of a basket of common goods and services (See my post of Sept. 10, 2005: indices generally; Nov.…
Of the first 70 participants in this year’s General Counsel Metrics benchmark survey, which opened in late January, slightly more than half of them are return respondents from last year. That means the others are new to the world’s largest benchmark study. I like to think that word is spreading…
“As the cost of outside counsel has risen, businesses have brought an increasing amount of work in-house.” With that declaration, Mark Roellig, the General Counsel of Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company, kicks off a thoughtful article in the Am. Lawyer, Jan. 2011 at 39. The article makes excellent points even…
A general formula for calculating heterogeneity in a group is 1-Σi2 where i is the proportion of members in the ith category. What does that mean in English? Let’s apply it to law firms retained by a department. Let’s say a law department retained a group of 100 law firms…
Don’t congratulate yourself and stop once you have gathered and confirmed the total amount your law department spends. Stopping there is a risk, as Ron Pol sees it, because “measuring total legal costs reinforces perceiving legal as a cost-center drain on resources.” He points this out in ACC Docket, Dec.…