It hurt to realize that all is not well with one metric: median sick days taken per year by in-house lawyers. We know from the Fin. Times, July 18, 2006 at 6 that “on average, managers in the UK take just 3.19 days off a year due to sickness —…
Here is a snippet of data from GC Mid Atlantic, Sept. 2006 at 29-30: “The Esquire Group, a national legal search and consulting firm, reports that its average hourly rate for contract attorneys is $80 per hour, while the average hourly rate of in-house counsel is $108 per hour and…
Previous posts have flayed at the Nov. 10, 2005 release by The Open Legal Standard of its “top 25 general law department metrics” (at 9) (See my posts of Sept. 13, 2006.). Unfortunately, criticism of seven of those metrics doesn’t end the onslaught. More are flawed. What sense is there…
Earlier I savaged three of the 27 general metrics proposed by the Corporate Legal Standard (See my post of Sept. 13, 2006.). My poison pen still has ink in it. Two of the metrics concern themselves with “the ratio of cost of legal research conducted” by outsourcing firms as compared…
The Nov. 10, 2005 report by The Corporate Legal Standard includes at page 9 a table of 26 metrics, which pertain to cycle time (3 metrics), cost (2), process efficiency (14), and productivity (7). The listing presumes that the direction of improvement for each metric is obvious: shorter cycle time,…
The life-blood of comparative empirical research on how law departments function has to be survey data, since no one aside from a handful of consultants develops any multi-department understanding. We rely on responses by law department lawyers, even though a well-documented flaw in many surveys may contest the accuracy of…
While I have complained about the lack of benchmark metrics for practice areas (See my posts of July 20, 2005 and of May 28, 2005 on this missing set of metrics.), in fact some have appeared. Metrics for litigators are discussed (See my posts of Jan. 25, 2006 on lawsuits…
The NY Times, Aug. 27, 2006 at 10WK, discusses a smorgasbord of survey methodology risks (See my post of Aug. 29, 2006 on margin of error and subgroups.). False precision and non-randomness deserve comments. “When a polling story presents data down to tenths of a percentage point, what the pollster…
An excellent commentary on survey methodology, in the NY Times, Aug. 27, 2006 at 10WK, discusses sampling error (See my posts of Dec. 9, 2005 and its description of margin of error; and Jan. 30, 2006 on Kirkpatrick & Lockhart’s “+ 10%” results.). The statistical term “sampling error” only properly…
A year ago I wrote about a Corporate Counsel survey (See my post of July 16, 2005 on law firm and law department relations.). This year the renamed monthly, InsideCounsel July 2006 at 52, repeated a question from 2005: “Most law firms pad their bills.” In 2005 36% of the…