A survey this blog addressed recently (See my post of Oct. 30, 2006 on an insurance industry study.) gave law department lawyers ten attributes to evaluate. Rather than ask them to “check all that apply” (See my post of Dec. 20, 2005 that castigates this methodology.) but not going so…
Once more I attack the Nov. 10, 2005 report by The Corporate Legal Standard, and specifically one item in a table entitled Top 25 Law Department Operations Metrics (at 10). One mouthful of a metric sounds innocuous yet impressive: “ratio of law department business processes undergoing automation/business processing reengineering/Six Sigma…
The Nov. 10, 2005 report by The Corporate Legal Standard includes a table entitled Top 25 Law Department Operations Metrics (at 10). Most of the proposed metrics are quite standard; two of them I would like to single out (See my posts of Sept. 13, 2006 for other comments on…
Chicopee, MA Mayor Michael D. Bissonnette was quoted in The Republican, Oct. 27, 2006 on development of the city’s properties. Evidently the city has had no central register of its properties such as schools, parks, strip islands, and right-of-ways. The Mayor said he is analyzing a report completed by a…
Every few years, early in a benchmarking project, a general counsel asks whether sharing data on staffing, spending, cases pending and the like risks anti-trust scrutiny. One law department I know went so far as to obtain an opinion of outside counsel that the benchmark study would not jeopardize the…
Laurence Simon’s Guide To In-House Counsel Salaries (2006) states that “around 600 of the [Irish] Republic’s 6,500 solicitors currently work in-house.” Elsewhere I have noted the ratio of in-house counsel to outside lawyers in England (See my post of April 13, 2006 with its estimate of 14.5%; and Feb. 1,…
Previously I have explored ways to depict and analyze law department data (See my two posts of Oct. 1, 2006 on graphics and visual techniques.). Other techniques of data exegesis are available for law department managers. One statistical tool is the “Gini coefficient”, a measure of concentration. If the Gini…
A fellow consultant claimed recently that a law department has the right to obtain from its law firms cost data on closed matters, even when those matters were other clients’. The data so gotten will help the law department establish typical costs incurred by types of matters. A benefit to…
Publicly-traded companies in the US must disclose each year the compensation of their five highest-paid executives. What those executives make in base, bonus, stock options, restricted stock grants and otherwise is all laid out in tables. It’s fairly easy to use that data, when compiled for general counsel in an…
Several previous posts have explained techniques to make sense out of data (See my posts of April 5, 2005 and May 10, 2005 on correlation; Nov. 30, 2005 on averages, medians, and modes; Aug. 14, 2005 on multiple regression; May 31, 2005 on bell curves; Nov. 13, 2005 on power…