I am a broken record on my mistrust of the term “best practice” (See my post of March 20, 2009: seven charges against best practices.). At the same time, no relativist I where anything goes, some practices I condemn as mistaken. Not to review bills from law firms that charge…
This idée fixe of mine has roots far back in this blog. A sample of the reasons why I doubt the existence of “best practices” gives me an opportunity to rehearse some of my arguments. A pattern of more and more law departments doing something hardly proves that the something…
Good survey methodology urges the use of seven-point scales, known as Likert scales, such as Very improbable (rated as 1), Improbable, Somewhat improbable, Neither probable nor improbable (4), Somewhat probable, Probable, and Very Probable (7). Most respondents don’t do well with more elaborate scales, there needs to be a neutral…
A mainstay of my consulting principles holds that one of the best contributions a consultant can make to a general counsel is to open the toolbox. The tool box of management practices includes lots of choices and approaches, the mixing and matching of which to the particular circumstances of the…
Henry Petroski tells us in his book on design that “By the latter part of the nineteenth century, some five hundred different types of hammers were being produced in Birmingham, England, alone.” If the market supported such an array of one particular tool, if no one hammer was manifestly the…
Lisa Damon spoke recently at a CTTymetrix conference and noted ten tools that her firm has used from the Six Sigma tool chest. Many of them I have written about; some are new to this blog. Here are thumbnails of them in terms of how law departments might apply them.…
James Stein describes “digraphs” in his book How Math Explains the World: A Guide to the Power of Numbers, from Car Repair to Modern Physics (HarperCollins 2008) at 3. According to Prof. Stein, “A digraph is a diagram with squares and arrows indicating the tasks to be done, the order…
So controversial has writing history become, so clotted with attacks on objectivity of historians in the past, that a special discipline has arisen – historiography. Historiographers situate historians and their writings in their governing milieu, where limits on their tools or awareness or freedom affected their topics, assumption, research and…
Richard Koch and Greg Lockwood, Superconnect: Harnessing the power of networks and the strength of weak links (Norton 2010) emphasizes the potential power if we reach out to of our so-called “weak connections.” Weak connections describe our acquaintances as compared to “strong connections” who are our close friends, family and…
“Study problems, not periods” appears in Deirdre N. McCloskey, The Bourgeois Virtues (Univ. Chicago, 2006) at xiv, where she quotes an unnamed historian. The injunction for historians applies to managers of law departments. It is not very useful to talk about “The Decade of Formation” (the ‘70s and the coalescence…