An earlier post looked at total legal spending as a percentage of data found by the 1993 Law Department Spending Survey of Price Waterhouse and its successor, the 2007 Law Department Survey of Hildebrandt (See my post of Dec.5, 2007.). Also noteworthy are the stability of other basic metrics over…
The 1993 Law Department Spending Survey of Price Waterhouse, which reported 1992 data, had 196 participants, with median worldwide revenue of $3.4 billion. Fourteen years later, the 2007 Law Department Survey of Hildebrandt, the successor of the PW survey, has 172 benchmark participants, with median worldwide revenue of $10.4 billion.…
The usefulness of benchmark data depends on the number of survey respondents, in part, as minor score differentials (such as the variation between a 4.1 and a 4.2 on a five-point scale) may only be significant with larger sample sizes (See my posts of Dec. 9, 2005 on margin of…
Some surveys and the interpretation of their results deliberately lean a particular way because the surveying organization has a bias and seeks certain results. Admittedly, no survey can be completely neutral, but that should be the goal. Examples on this blog have been plentiful of possible survey bias. Here is…
When a survey announces that the average or median figure for something one year was X and the same figure rose or fell Y percent the next year, someone who wants to make use of that data must have confidence that the survey populations both years were either very large…
An interview in the Met. Corp. Counsel, Vol. 15, July 2007 at 27, spills over with metrics. In the Eastern District of Virginia “there is a 15% chance of the defendants succeeding on a motion to transfer.” Later the interviewed notes that in almost every District Court, “patentee plaintiffs have…
A frequent kind of question on surveys is the multiple-choice question, even though they are beset with methodological traps. Especially egregious are those questions that invite respondents to “choose all that apply” (See my posts of July 21, 2005 about that instruction; Dec. 20, 2005 that criticizes such a methodology;…
It’s an abysmal survey that mostly asks for data in ranges. With range data, “Check size of department: 1-3 lawyers, 4-8 lawyers; 9-15…” as an example,” other than parroting back the results, all you can create are three-by-three or four-by-fours tables – or whatever number of ranges you have –…
A previous post explored the statistical relationships in large US law departments between both lawyers and total legal spending compared to market capitalization (See my post of July 1, 2007.). That data set, admittedly small with only 35 companies, enticed me into calculating some additional correlations. The correlation between the…
Multiple-choice questions on surveys present several challenges (See my post of Dec. 20, 2005 on several methodological issues.). Because surveys use them all the time, it is worth noting one more criteria to keep in mind for multiple-choice inquiries. One egregious error is for a survey question to give several…