Everywhere one hears about “globalization” and the need for law departments of large companies to bestride our planet (See my post of Feb. 12, 2006 on the different terms global, international and multi-national.). It turns out that “foreign sales of America’s S&P 500 companies amount to a modest 25% of…
Avert your eyes if math makes you break out. An article summarizing data from 102 Canadian law departments, published in Canadian Lawyer, May 2005 at 35, states that the departments “estimate that they will farm out an average of 32 percent of their work to outside counsel this year.” Let’s…
Many law departments rely solely on corporate information systems (IS) support. Some departments, however, have their own IS staff. Of the 130 law departments that provided compensation data for the 2005 Hildebrandt Law Department Survey, 27 of them reported having at least one IS Manager. In fact, those 27 companies…
I was struck by the statement in an article, Corp. Legal Times, Vol. 14, May 2004 at 24, that “NCR’s metrics system allows for comparative measurement of the performance of both in-house and outside counsel working on an issue.” The piece refers to the evaluation factors on which they score…
For law department managers, the levels of numbers they can make use of are countless. By that pun, I mean that we can aggregate or breakdown metrics as much as we have data, time and energy. Consider an illustration from a recent consulting project. Our quarry was quasi-legal work, the…
What if a law department added up all the months its lawsuits have been underway, and divided by the number of lawsuits? That metric would be a weighted average of duration, and if cycle time matters, the department should strive to reduce the metric over time. With this calculation, if…
The Federation of European Employers (FedEE) released a study in September 2004 of employment litigation in European countries. The incidence of legal action by employees varied hugely. “A typical large company in Belgium can expect to defend 28 court cases brought by present or former employees every year, but a…
Pitirim Sorokin, the first chair of Harvard’s sociology department, coined “quantophrenia” for the psychological compulsion to grasp for numbers. “Victims of quantophrenia … obsess over numbers as descriptors, no matter how dubious their basis or questionable their provenance.” (Wilson Quarterly, Vol. 30, Winter 2006 at 28). I like law-department metrics…
A fascinating book on statistics in the social sciences, by Judith M. Tanur and six other editors, Statistics: A Guide to the Unknown (Holden-Day, 2nd ed. 1978), discusses troubles when people estimate demand by collecting survey data. Think of all the surveys that ask general counsel about the likelihood of…
I have doubted some statistics given out as savings that various techniques have achieved (See my post of Sept. 14, 2005 on 20% for e-billing and Aug. 5, 2005 for returns on other techniques.) A statistical notion, regression to the mean, may explain some of the alleged savings. Isn’t it…