Almost 200 senior in-house lawyers responded to a survey question that asked them to identify which “tracking metrics” they currently use. The survey data is courtesy of LexisNexis CounselLink study, entitled “Effects of the Current Economic Downturn on U.S. Law Departments” 2009 at 14. The eighth most frequently tracked metric…
I wrote about the article by Bill Turner of Womble Carlyle on Monte Carlo simulations, and emailed him with some questions (See my post of June 26, 2009: Monte Carlo and sensitivity analysis.). One was about law departments that have used the firm’s Monte Carlo capabilities. While unwilling to disclose…
A clear explanation of the statistical model, known as the Monte Carlo simulation appears in Womble Carlyle’s FocusExtra, 2Q2009 at 1, by Bill Turner. The newsletter explains the technique in the context of estimating the cost of a lawsuit through trial. Essentially, for four stages of a litigation, the law…
Queuing theory and its models often assume that the rates of arrival of work and delivery of service can be described by a Poisson distribution (See my post of Jan. 20, 2006: one of many kinds of distributions of numbers; and Aug. 16, 2006: predicts likelihood of event during a…
The challenge when a legal group commissions a custom benchmarking project is not creating the questions, finding comparable law departments, confirming the accuracy of the metrics, or analyzing the results. Rather, it is the weeks and weeks needed to persuade other companies to submit data and the passage of time…
A physicist, Jorge Hirsch, devised a formula to determine the quality of scientific papers published by a scientist. “The h-index is the number n of a researcher’s papers that have been cited by other papers at least n times. High numbers = important science = important scientist.” According to Wired,…
From the standpoint of a typical general counsel, the benchmark surveys you can buy leave several scars and irritations. Sometimes subsidiaries submit responses, which skews the results. Many questions on the survey may not matter to you. Generic questions applicable to all don’t fit the nuances of your industry They…
We talk of inside lawyers per billion of revenue but it would be more insightful to convert that metric to lawyer hours worked and to add outside counsel hours, thus producing total lawyer hours per billion. (See my post of Nov. 8, 2005: measuring total hours of legal advice given.)…
A fascinating article in the NY Times, May 11, 2009 at B7, describes an online service that computes the answers to questions by drawing on collections of data the company has amassed. Some 100 employees in Wolfram Research have gathered, verified and organized huge amounts of data. When a user…
Matthew W. Geekie, general counsel of Graybar Electric Co., is the only male in a law department of 13 people. The other three lawyers and the remaining nine staff are all female. Moreover, Graybar’s net sales for 2008, as a distributor of electrical, communications and networking products surpassed $5.4 billion,…