A commonplace holds that half the lawyers practicing law privately in the United States, meaning not as an employee of a company, government agency or other entity, practice solo. Behind the shingle is a single. It may be that half the internal law departments – using an expansive term “department”…
One point made by Boris Groysberg, Chasing Stars: The Myth of Talent and the Portability of Performance (Princeton Univ. 2010) at 54, concerns job tenure and productivity. From his careful study of equity research analysts who were top-ranked by Institutional Investor, he confirmed what others have found: “Empirical studies have…
General counsel who are inclined to transfer matters and service arrangements handled by a partner who moves to another firm should think twice. That would be the advice of Boris Groysberg, Chasing Stars: The Myth of Talent and the Portability of Performance (Princeton Univ. 2010) at 8. Based on an…
Who, exactly, completes benchmark surveys? I looked at the positions of the first 215 respondents to my General Counsel Metrics benchmark survey. 131 of them (65%) are general counsel. Another 30 (14%) are law department administrators and about the same number are direct reports to the General Counsel. In other…
Earlier I discussed what I thought was established wisdom: people with wide-ranging “weak ties” tap into and benefit more from ideas than those who mostly confer with their relatively few strong ties who think similarly (See my post of Dec. 31, 2010: a network perspective on the strength of weak…
A full year has passed since my inaugural “Morrison on Metrics” column for InsideCounsel Exclusives. Quite a few of the columns (10) had to do with benchmarks: inside spend per lawyer correlated to outside spend; benchmarks across regions; are participants in benchmark surveys representative; anonymous participants; one country vs entire-globe…
Than Luu of the Public Law Research Institute published a very informative paper in 1995 on much touted “the litigation explosion” (See my post of May 14, 2005: other findings from Luu’s paper.). Among other points he debunked the unfounded claim about hundreds of billions spent each year on US…
A piece in Met. Corp. Counsel, April 2011 at 13, brought to my awareness a new consideration: matter management systems that allow law firms to access them directly. Most typically, law firms log on to upload their invoices. Mark Poag of Datacert warns that “Although collaboration is imperative, it should…
A law department I know has adopted a remarkable range of software for its specialized corporate needs. It uses EDGARizer (EDGARfilings, part of Thomson Reuters) and EDGARlink (SEC) for Edgar filings and EMMA (MSRB – Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board) for 529 filings. It has also licensed BlueWin (Bank of New…
Save your telomeres. Telomeres stop chromosomes from fraying at the ends. From time to time chromosomes replicate and each time they do it shortens their telomeres. After 50-70 such divisions (a number known as the Hayflick limit after its discoverer), a chromosome can grow no shorter and it stops dividing.…