I have written frequently about correlations (See my post of Feb.13, 2008: correlations with 16 references.). What I haven’t explained is how to find out whether a correlation is one that you can rely on. The statistician’s term is “statistically significant,” a standard that has three components. To explain them…
Northeast Utilities is a utility holding company whose units serve about 1.9 million customers, generate revenues of about $5.8 billion, and employ about 6,200 workers. General Counsel Gregory Butler heads a team of 40 lawyers and 18 staff. In the article from the Nat. L.J., Oct. 22, 2009 where this…
Email me if you would like a copy of the 2009 Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) benchmark survey or the Asia-Pacific (APAC) survey. Compiled by Laurence Simons, legal recruiters, and Rees Morrison, they cover 123 EMEA legal departments and 57 APAC departments, respectively. Total legal spend in APAC per…
Recent benchmark surveys by Laurence Simons,legal recruiters,and Rees Morrison report on 123 Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) legal departments and 57 Asia-Pacific (APAC) legal departments, respectively. Email me if you would like a free copy and specify which one. The median revenue per APAC lawyer was $250 million; the…
This post is for the mathematically intrepid. Present skewed data on log scales. My benchmark projects always lead me to think of normalizing data by company revenue: lawyers per billion, total legal spend per billion. From a recent article, however, I realize that perhaps it is possible to normalize data…
Let’s start with how to create a heat map. Take all the litigation pending against your company and assign each lawsuit a percentage from 1-100 on the likelihood that you will pay some non-trivial amount in settlement or judgment. Then use the same scale of 1-100 to estimate the significance…
A recent article states: “[T]he size of the U.S. and the potential for suits to be brought in 50 states, each with its own laws and regulations, necessitates a much broader network of law firms supporting the legal department. One London-based GC told me that he manages the whole EU…
Various posts on this blog discuss metrics and take inflation into account (See my post of April 27, 2006: effective hourly rates of the plaintiffs’ bar; May 31, 2005: growth of civil legal spending by Canadian businesses; Dec. 5, 2007: median revenue of a survey population 15 years later; April…
According to the Law of Large Numbers, “you can have a high degree of confidence in the average value of a sample if the sample includes a very large number of observations.” As explained in the NY Rev. of Books, Oct. 8, 2009 at 30, therefore, the more legal departments…
Disappointed recently with sloppy benchmark efforts by several purveyors, I realized that the law department world lacks third-party assessments of benchmarking efforts. Journalists from time to time go a round or two with data from benchmark surveys, mostly compensation, but they never lay a glove on methodology. Any law firm,…