Law departments can share in benchmarking surveys nearly all of their metrics without concern for harming their company. Spending, staffing, matter loads and other data does not yield anyone a competitive advantage so long as the data is aggregated, normalized and anonymous (See my post of Oct. 17, 2005 that…
Deep in an article about economics expert witnesses, in the Wall St. J., Vol. 249, March 19, 2007 at A1, A11, there appears at first read an astonishing factoid. “Peter Nordberg, a partner in the Philadelphia law firm of Berger & Montague, counts 87 cases since 2000 where economic or…
A number is a digit – “Ten is larger than eight.” A digit used as an adjective becomes datum: “We have ten cases.” Data presented to make a larger point than mere enumeration become a metric: “The ten cases pending is lower than the volume we typically face” (See my…
Let’s convert a common description for stock markets – volatility – to an application for law departments. A law department tracks the amount of all bills that come from outside counsel each quarter. The department then creates a chart with columns corresponding to the number of bills it receives during…
Met. Corp. Counsel, Vol. 15, Feb. 2007 at 28, includes an interview of Mark Holton, the general counsel of RJ Reynolds. Holton uses the chic term “data mining” repeatedly and uses it interchangeably with “data analysis” to describe what his department does with the e-billing data it amasses. He doesn’t…
In its “Management Report 2006,” Team Factors Ltd. presents data from 102 New Zealand corporations. A summary of the report states within those companies median lawyers per 1,000 employees was 6.86. I question the usefulness of such a metric (See my post of June 7, 2006 that criticizes a metric…
Five posts savaged an assortment of metrics in the November 10, 2005 overview of the Open Legal Standards Initiative (OLSI, a non-profit entity) (See my posts of Sept. 13, 2006 (2); Sept. 17, 2006; Nov. 2 and 5, 2006.). Nina Wong, the CEO of Corporate Legal Standard (a for-profit company)…
Legal metrics catch my eye and the Nat’l L.J., Vol. 29, Jan. 8, 2007 at 8, about to Matthew Fawcett, the general counsel of JDS Uniphase Corp., offered some eye-catchers. The profile says that the company’s “legal arm” – it does the legwork? – consists of 30 lawyers and that…
One hundred percent of the readers of this blog should realize that I like statistical analyses, think they are insightful, and wish the law department industry had more and better statistics (See my posts of May 31, 2006 urging in-house counsel to become comfortable with statistics; Sept. 4, 2005 on…
Michael Woods made several points regarding my comments on PricewaterhouseCooper’s study of patent litigation (See my post of Dec. 31, 2006). First, wrote Woods, “although 53% of the cases result in damage awards, according to the study, the study does not count injunctions, summary judgments, and motions to dismiss. The…