The seven mistakes law departments can make regarding performance metrics In MIT Sloan Mgt. Rev., Vol. 48, Spring 2007 at 19, Michael Hammer brings down the tablets of the seven deadly sins of performance measurement. Let me translate the sins into law-departmentspeak. 1. Vanity: “to use measures that will inevitably…
The ACC Docket, Vol. 25, June 2007, at 66, pours out a full measure of metrics concerning US IP litigation. For the benefit of law departments that have IP lawyers, I quote and comment on five of them, but omit their citations to four different original sources. 1. “In the…
A survey for law departments asks respondents to “rank from ‘1’ to ‘9’ in order of frequency of use the billing arrangements listed below.” A typical list follows, not in alphabetical order I note (See my post of Dec. 20, 2005 with methodological warnings.). What I like was the survey’s…
Those who analyze the comparative performances of different law departments could treat the benchmark metric of total legal spending (TLS) per unit of revenue as a productivity metric. Among a group of companies whose businesses are roughly comparable, the law department with a lower ratio of TLS to revenue is…
A publicly-traded company’s market cap is “perhaps the most important single measure of size and economic relevance. The market cap directly affects a company’s ability to control its own strategic destiny and is highly correlated with its total net income.” (Lowell Bryan in the McKinsey Quarterly, 2007, No. 1 at…
Profit per in-house lawyer might be a useful metric on which to compare law departments, if one accepts the reasoning of Lowell Bryan in the McKinsey Quarterly, 2007 No. 1 at 57. That normalizing benchmarking, he would probably say, indicates with some significance legal productivity. I am leery of this…
A survey done in 2004 and the six-page report of its results, tells you almost everything you might want to know about the internal legal functions of two-year US colleges. It draws on the responses of 25 lawyers who replied out of the 42 that were identified. Three points deserve…
The Shaw Group, a $5 billion engineering and related services group, announces that its general counsel for the past eight years, Gary Graphia, has been promoted to “Chief Legal Officer and Corporate Secretary.” Shaw has brought on board a former law-firm partner, Cliff Rankin, to become the “General Counsel and…
By “dormancy months” I mean months where the amounts billed by law firms are much less than the average monthly billings over the lifetime of a case, such as 20 percent or less. For example, if a case lasts 36 months, and costs $3.6 million in legal fees and expenses,…
An article in the McKinsey Quarterly, 2007 No. 1 at 77, notes perceptively that “in a competitive market economy, performance is fundamentally relative, not absolute.” It’s about how your company stacks up against its competitors. That’s true likewise for general counsel as to their management efforts. Law departments compete with…