Two research findings were reported in the Financial Times (Feb. 2005): (1) independent research commissioned by the manufacturer of the Blackberry found that the average user converted about four and a half hours a week of downtime into productive time; and (2) Intel studied 100 users across all functions who…
Articles Posted in Productivity
In-house productivity muted by meetings?
A 2004 study by Synectics, a consultancy, found that senior and middle managers spent more than three quarters of their time in meetings. Would this metric hold true for law department attorneys? Worse, on average only 12 percent of managers thought their meetings were productive. Taken together, law departments may…
Using Law School Students as Interns
I know two New York City law departments that each year bring in a couple of third-year law school students as interns. The departments pay them a very modest stipend and try to find them tasks that are interesting and useful. This is a commendable process. Law school students will…
The Missing Metric – Productivity
A gaping hole sits in the middle of law department metrics. Nearly everything can be counted and benchmarked, except for lawyer productivity. No one has figured out how to measure the quality-adjusted output of lawyers. By quality-adjusted I mean that you can’t simply count the number of contracts completed per…
Document Assembly Coming Apart?
Way back in 1986 and 1987 I was an editor of Document Assembly News, published by the ABA’s Law Practice Management Section. The early enthusiasts of document assembly, a watered-down expert system for creating drafts based on if-then logic, thought that the technique would sweep through the law. It didn’t. …
Setting Priorities on the Deluge of Projects Hitting the Law Department
Hi Value – Tough Implement Hi Value – Easy Implement Lo Value – Tough Implement Lo Value – Easy Implement Johns Manville’s law department used a Resource Allocation Prioritization Process (as a consultant, I cringe at the name, but we all go to great lengths to find catchy acronyms). If…