The adept use of statistics can greatly strengthen those who manage inside lawyers. Four uses of statistics particularly stand out: to explain, to change minds, to forecast and to diagnose. Here are brief comments on each application. Statistics can: Describe a phenomenon, such as the concentration of spending on…
An ad by K&L Gates in InsideCounsel, Feb. 2007 at 94, offers comments by Peter Kreindler, the general counsel of Honeywell. Kreindler describes an internal legal web site his department maintains for clients (See my posts of June 6, 2006 and March 1, 2007 #2 for more on this site.).…
Moments are terms statisticians use to describe the distribution of data points. Consider how a law department’s invoices can illustrate four moments (See my post of May 31, 2006 generally on statistics and references cited.) The first central moment is zero (See my post of Nov. 30, 2005 on illustrations…
Even if a law department figures out the right strategy, there are many slips ‘twixt cup and lip. At least 10 of them come to mind as problems with implementing the proper strategy: 1. Too much work 2. Lack of sufficient metrics to determine whether the strategy is successfully implemented…
A management initiative intends to change of capability, whereas a process repeatedly cycles through similar tasks to produce a result. An online site says that a process is “a sequence of activities that take an input and produce an output. In business, a process is supposed to add value to…
We all know the session evaluation form to be completed at the end of the training session or the two-day conference on leadership. Those forms may tell the organizers and sponsors about the food, location, pacing, and other features of the event – but they can’t tell whether the objectives…
The notion of a portfolio, a collection, has many applications in law department management. Legal departments have an assortment of initiatives underway (See my posts of March 27, 2005 about the value of an inventory of them; and Feb. 6, 2007 on an innovation pyramid.); together they comprise a portfolio.…
Rossabeth Moss Kanter of the Harvard Business School urges senior executives to categorize their investments in innovative products or services by means of a pyramid. At the top are a few “strategic bets,” in the middle is a wider set of new efforts and pilot projects, and at the broad…
In 1992, the general counsel of Reebok, Jack Douglas, drafted what he called the Reebok Rules. Have those famous Rules passed the test of time? To start on that profound question, I categorized the 23 rules into five topical areas. According to this exercise, nine addressed productivity (No’s 8, 9,…
A hardy band of practitioners carry the torch for artificial intelligence and rules-based legal drafting or analysis. Among the few whom I know are Marc Lauritsen (Capstone Practice Solutions, Harvard, MA and see my post of Jan. 28, 2007.) Eric Little is another, who is now at Wilson Sonsini but…