General Counsel Metrics will offer Industry Analyses starting after the second release of its global benchmark survey in July. Each of the 25 Industry Analyses available offers deeper insights than the no-cost, 60-page Standard Report. I strongly believe that general counsel should look only at benchmark metrics from companies in…
On a pace to exceed 1,000 legal departments, the first release this year of GC Metrics survey of 2011 staffing and spending goes this week to the 332 departments that have submitted their data. The lengthy report focuses on 25 fundamental management metrics, such as lawyers per billion of revenue,…
A ground-breaking report, which combines data on matter management systems (MMS) with benchmark metrics, is now available from General Counsel Metrics, LLC. MMS Insights reports on 130 users of more than 15 matter management systems in Canadian and U.S. legal departments. Typically, a large share of the spend by a…
The Fortune 500 amassed revenue of close to $10 trillion in 2011. At five lawyers typically for every billion of revenue, they alone would employ something like 50,000 in-house lawyers. What else can we cobble together about the number of law departments in the United States. With something like 25,000…
Here is a classic example of the distorted benchmarks produced by from some small companies. The Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) manages the GMAT test taken worldwide for admission to business schools. The current general counsel joined ten years ago as the only lawyer for the non-profit’s 34 employees. Today,…
Here are metaposts on seven domains of mathematics that play a role in legal department management. Bayesian statistics (See my post of April 5, 2009: Bayesian statistics with 6 references.) Bell curves and normal distributions (See my post of March 12, 2009: bell curves with 8 references.). Correlations (See my…
Regular readers of this blog understand, or at least have heard of, distributions of data that look like a bell. Many toward the middle hump; tails of less frequent amounts on either end. Invoice amounts for large law departments follow that pattern, for example. Some readers might even speak comfortably…
Nonlinear systems occur when “outputs of a system cannot be expressed in terms of a sum of inputs, each multiplied by a simple constant.” The quote comes from John Brockman, Ed., This Will Make You Smarter (Harper Collins 2012) at 184, a piece on scale analysis. If a formula could…
The drivers of legal costs are many, but certainly one of them is the pace of change and growth of an industry segment. I would hypothesize that an industry’s pace correlates well with total legal spending. How might research quantify that ferment fomented? An article on corporate governance published in…
In the world of claims management, predictive analytics has blossomed lately, at least according to an article in Lit. Mgt., Spring 2012 at 44. “Predictive analytics is the analysis of data through statistical or mathematical techniques that results in meaningful relationships being identified in the data.” Informed by predictive analytics,…