The general counsel of Alfa Laval co-authored a solid article in the ACC Docket, Nov. 2011 at 39. The authors discuss a common method to describe possible outcomes: expected value. Each outcome that has a monetary result is expressed as the percentage of the particular outcome multiplied by the money.…
“[M]aking a prediction in terms of probability simply does not fit well with predicting an event that will happen only once.” A lawyer who tries to give a client the likelihood as to whether something will happen – for example, the odds that the Department of Justice will oppose a…
An interview published this month of John Oviatt, chief legal officer of the Mayo Clinic, who oversees 35 lawyers and 45 other legal staff, covered his views of the importance of various benchmark numbers. Oviatt’s view is that “the second most important of all metrics is the metric of leverage,…
For a legal department its ratio of legal expense to revenue needs to be one of the top metrics, in the view of John Oviatt, chief legal officer of the Mayo Clinic. Here are his five reasons from an interview on Law.com, which I have numbered for reference. [1] “It’s…
If you’d like to become more comfortable with logarithms and exponential functions, in the context of running a law department and understanding its metrics, you might have a hankering to read my InsideCounsel column on those mathematical relations. My Morrison on Metrics column compares linear and exponential functions and offers…
Two websites are particularly well known for analyzing politician’s statements for accuracy, FactCheck and PolitiFact. Reading about them in the Economist, Nov. 26, 2011 at 43, I found myself wishing there were equivalents for articles about law department management (or blogs, for that matter). In some measure I have cast…
When you hear of a statistical finding, you should want to understand that number’s reliability. If the research that produced the number were repeated several times, how much would the results vary? Consider an example. Let’s make the simplifying assumption that the participants in the GC Metrics benchmark survey make…
Metrics from small law departments exhibit much more variability than the same metrics from large law departments. For example, from one year to the next, outside counsel spending per lawyer will swing higher or lower for law departments with one-to-three lawyers than for departments with 20+ lawyers. The explanation, drawn…
To lessen the influence of outliers, a set of numbers can be Winsorized. Named after Charles Winsor, to Winsorize data, tail values at the extremes are set equal to some specified percentile of the data, such as plus and minus four standard deviations. Here’s how it’s done. For a 90…
Many posts on this blog have dipped into the well of the annual Fulbright & Jaworski surveys of litigation data. Each year the firm polls a few more than 400 law departments in the United States and the United Kingdom. If the responding group year after year remains significantly similar…