My post of Dec. 7, 2005 gives the background of a 2003 study performed for the American Arbitration Association (AAA), summarized in the ACC Docket, July/Aug. 2004 at 93. The summary ventured down an interesting tangent, stating that “the price/earnings ratios (often thought of, among other things, as a measure…
Two years ago, you surveyed your 50 key law firms for their satisfaction with you (bet you hadn’t thought of doing that!), and the median rating was 4.7. This year, with the same 50 firms, that rating rose to 4.8, an increase of 2.1 percent. Can you pat yourself on…
Software designed to make a mass of information more meaningful by displaying it graphically holds promise for law departments. Advanced departments, awash in various kinds of data, will find and display data patterns more effectively with visualization software. Let’s consider some possibilities, such as if a law department: Has…
Three research firms – the Corporate Library, Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS), and Governance Metrics International – rate companies for their quality of governance (Fortune, Nov.14, 2005 at 46). Each rating firm uses its own methodology and data sets to grade companies on the important set of activities loosely termed “governance.”…
Benchmark metrics typically come in three forms: averages, medians and weighted averages. Think of 11 law departments each pooling data on their percentage of certified paralegals. For the average, total the 11 percentages and divide by 11. For the median, rank the 11 figures from highest to lowest and pick…
Like a 49’er looking for gold, I pan through streams of on-line material hoping to find nuggets that glitter for law department managers. The quantitative ore I often find pertains to patents. Why this online nexus? Patent filings are public information, as are patent law suits. Another reason is that…
The term “fractal” describes nature where small parts resemble the whole, such as a bay’s indentations resembling those of a long shore line (Fortune, July 11, 2005 at 99-100). The pattern of invoices arriving at a law department in a month looks like the quarterly pattern and the latter looks…
Thus proclaims BTI Consulting Group (Law Practice, Vol. 31, Oct./Nov. 2005 at 11). According to that research firm, a perfect storm of pricing pressures accounts for this: regulatory changes, heightened risks, increased litigiousness and “marked decreases in in-house legal staff.” The Hildebrandt 2005 U.S. Law Department Survey, which includes mostly…
Most law departments have available the data they need to create benchmarks going back three to five years. As an example, the law department can count its total headcount on December 31st of each year and use the revenue for that year to calculate legal staff per billion of revenue.…
ACC and its co-sponsor, Lexis Nexis, reported survey results in 2004 from 1,814 law department responses. The summary states: “The average per month budget for legal research is nearly $19,000, with the median at $5,000. The budget for online and dial-up services averages around $1,000 annually, making it only a…