From Hottopic, a publication of ARMA International at 7, come several shrewd pieces of advice about what to do before you hit the “Send” button for an e-mail. (1) Check the recipients of the e-mail to be sure they are the ones you want to write to. (2) Use a…
The Gallup Organization conducted a large survey in August, 2007, which American Magazine thereafter compiled. Parts of that compilation are in the business section of the NY Times, Feb. 23, 2008. “When asked how much time their colleagues waste during the day, the mean number reported was 90 minutes. When…
The term “information architecture” appears in David Weinberger, Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder (Henry Holt 2007) at 47. Weinberger defines it as “the art and science of organizing electronic information.” On this blog, the information architecture includes (1) categories, (2) cross-references to previous posts, and…
I have been an enthusiast of dictation and voice recognition (See my posts March 17, 2006: higher pay to stenos than to digital equipment transcribers; Aug. 26, 2005: voice recognition software as a chimera; Nov. 20, 2006: voice recognition software; Feb. 4, 2007: digital transcription technologies; Feb. 6, 2006: voice…
A white paper published by BlackBerry cites (at 12) a 2004 study by Ipsos-Reid. Not surprisingly, the study found that those who use a BlackBerry become more productive. “The median and user reported recovering 47 minutes of productive time per day by having BlackBerry connectivity, which annualizes to 196 hours…
The average person can only focus on four things at once. According to the Wall. St. J., Feb. 12, 2008 at B4, which summarizes research from a team at the University of Oregon, the ability to focus on more things at the same time is correlated with IQ. (This boomer…
The Client Advisory produced jointly by Hildebrandt International and Citi Private Bank, Jan. 2008 at 5, shows “average annual productivity” by four categories of law-firm lawyers. From a group of large US law firms that were described as “lower profit firms” (firms having Profit Per Equity Partner less than $500,000…
A study by IDC concludes, according to Info. Mgt. J., Vol. 42, Jan./Feb. 2008 at 14, that “a company with 1,000 information workers can expect to lose more than $5 million in annual salary costs because of time spent on unproductive e-mail searches.” Does that loss scale downward, so that…
Well-managed law departments, when they reach double-figures of lawyers, usually have someone who handles budgets, non-lawyer staff, facilities, computers and other administrative tasks (See my post of Aug. 1, 2006: lawyer compared to operations roles.). Administrators, as they are generally known, handle the thankless tasks of keeping the machinery ticking…
“Regression analysis suggests that legal departments will be most efficient when more than half of legal work (55%) is conducted in-house.” For the 161 companies in the 2006 GCR Benchmarking Exercise, the average law department said it conducted 37 percent of its work in-house. How do you measure the percentage…