Joseph Mazur, What’s Luck Got to Do with It? – The history, mathematics, and psychology of the gambler’s illusion (Princeton 2010) at 92, “Economists have long sought a meaninghful measure of risk, which should depend on a person’s specific financial situation.” Similarly, the finances of a company affect how legal…
Penny Simpson, energetic, funny, generous of her time and talents, caring of those around her, a completely warm and loving person, and incidentally the very capable founder of an innovative legal technology consulting firm, lost it all two years ago from a massive heart attack. Amazingly, you could say, she…
Wordnik.com shows how English words are actually used in books and other publications. I searched for “law department” and found most of the references were to the law programs at universities, but with one charming exception. “After he took her picture, just as a lark, and displayed it in his…
In 1998, while a partner at Altman & Weil consulting to law departments as I have done for the years since, I wrote an article about ten 1999 resolutions for general counsel. Now, 14 years later, have those resolutions been acted on and come to pass? No, since the first…
In litigation, loser pays in Germany and Australia: This blog has noted that the UK and Germany have loser-pays rules for litigants. According to the Economist, Dec. 10, 2011, that is the norm also in Canada (See my post of July 1, 2009: loser-pays jurisdictions with 6 references; June 2,…
A stimulating review of two books about the history of science gave Nicholas Jardine, an emeritus professor at the University of Cambridge, an opportunity to summarize four high-level perspectives on scientific efforts. His review is in the Times Lit. Supp., Dec. 16, 2011 at 3-4. My application of those perspectives…
Profit figures of law firms. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that law firms in that country earned gross profits of $51 billion in 2003, which was a profit rate of 40 percent compared with revenues. However, the Rand report, “Innovations in the Provision of Legal Services in the United States,…
Macroeconomics takes a top-down perspective on economic activity whereas microeconomics looks at the elements of economic activity. According to Nicholas Wapshott, Keynes Hayek: the clash that defined modern economics (Norton 2011) at 196, John Maynard Keynes invented the macro branch. Possibly, but whether he did or not is beside the…
I admire the report just issued by Fronterion Top Ten Trends for Legal Outsourcing in 2012. The full version is at www.fronterion.com/tenfor2012. As I thought about trying to write a counterpart for law department management, another part of my mind objected. The objections carried the day. Trend-spotting has an air…
Splines. A spline function is based on the difference between a firm’s performance and the performance of a relevant comparison group. For instance, a spline function would look at a manufacturer’s law department metrics after subtracting from them the medians in that industry (See my post of July 31, 2011:…