Lawyers should appreciate the difference. First expressed by an economist, Frank Knight, there is legal risk “when the probability of an outcome is possible to calculate (or is knowable),” whereas legal uncertainty “when the probability of an outcome is not possible to determine (or is unknowable),” Harvard Bus. Rev., Vol.…
If you want to bring about improvement and change in a law department, understand “mental models.” A mental model is the framework from which someone perceives and understands the world. For example, someone’s model of a law department might be that of a smoothly ticking clock, or perhaps a jungle…
“Whether diagnosing patients or evaluating job candidates, human beings [RWM: no exceptions for lawyers] vastly overestimate their ability to make judgments, research shows.” The NY Times pronounced this Aug. 28, 2005 (at pg. WK4) in a piece about statistics and baseball, and continued, “Numbers and analysis almost always make people…
Ever since John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern published Theory of Games and Economic Behavior in 1944, economists and other social scientists have tried to apply to real-life situations the theoretical insights subsumed under “game theory.” As with the classic prisoners’ dilemma, game theoretic analyses work best when two parties…
Clients often plead with their in-house counselors to estimate the likelihood of, for instance, a patent holding up to an infringement claim or an indemnity provision being triggered. Researchers at Wharton’s Risk Management and Decision Process Center have demonstrated that a lawyer (actually, they generalized to all people) has the…
Intuition, the brain’s process of interpreting and concluding without resort to conscious thought, has its place for law department managers, but they also ought to know its two major limitations. A piece by Eric Bonabeau in CSFB’s Thought Leader Forum (2003) stresses two inadequacies of intuition. “Intuition is not always…
I reject Weserman’s main title. Corporate counsel make decisions every hour that change how the law department operates – they manage. Those decisions range from asinine to sublime, because of their consequences to quality, productivity, cost, client satisfaction, and personnel. A few lawyers make progressive, defensible management decisions most of…
A fascinating article highlighted three common ways groups of fail to interpret information. Translated into the law department’s world, these information failures help us understand why law departments might ignore or devalue indications – signals – of serious problems [46 MIT Sloan Mgt. Rev., Spring 2005, pg 5]. Signals are…
A widely applied psychometric test is usually widely known as Myers-Briggs. (I am an ENTJ, if you want to know.) Understanding style differences can help managers significantly. I do not know whether data exists to compare MBTI (Type Instrument) scores of private practitioners to those of in-house attorneys. But research…
What psychologists know about people’s behavior when they must make choices has applications for law departments. A piece in the NY Times explained these findings about choice behavior (March 7, 2005 at page WK12). For example, when people face too many choices, such as juggling more than 18 major issues…