The drivers of legal costs are many, but certainly one of them is the pace of change and growth of an industry segment. I would hypothesize that an industry’s pace correlates well with total legal spending. How might research quantify that ferment fomented? An article on corporate governance published in…
Reid G. Smith, who is currently Enterprise Content Management Director and IT Upstream Services Manager, Marathon Oil, published several years ago a list of non-starters for knowledge management initiatives in law departments. I quote the four. • Expect that people will “make time” for KM. Either give them extra time,…
During the summer of 2011, Legal Suite, a leading French provider of matter management software for legal departments, conducted a survey of visitors to Village de Justice, an online site for lawyers. They collected 58 responses and published the results. One question asked about the benefits respondents anticipated from specialized…
An article in Fortune, April 9, 2012 at 16, describes an ingenious method to quantify the possibility that companies will tangle over their patents. An analyst needs to compare how often companies cite each other’s patents in their own applications. “If each company’s patents are of equal quality, and each…
In the world of claims management, predictive analytics has blossomed lately, at least according to an article in Lit. Mgt., Spring 2012 at 44. “Predictive analytics is the analysis of data through statistical or mathematical techniques that results in meaningful relationships being identified in the data.” Informed by predictive analytics,…
Assuming the general level of managerial skill in U.S. law departments has risen over the past 20 years, how might we detect that progress? One clue could be that the number of lawyers and dollars required to support each billion dollars of revenue has held steady (See my post of…
An ongoing survey distributed by Hyperion Research Group, experts in patent management and technology, listed the following eleven packages for intellectual property packages. A handful of posts on this blog have mentioned some of these, such as CPA Global, Dennemeyr, and CPI, but for all the others they are making…
Unable to pass up metrics that pertain to law departments, unwilling not to squeeze metrics for what might drip out, I will confess that a recent sentence left me puzzled. In Met. Corp. Counsel, March 2012 at 16, an FTI consultant shares some findings from FTI’s interviews with 31 in-house…
Previous posts have mentioned some of the reasons “number of lawyers in a legal department” is inexact. “Number of lawyers” in the colloquial sense will do for many purposes, such as headcount and planning how many attendees at a retreat, even though more precise or different metrics could add insights.…
Scientists thrive on experiments, carefully designed and thoughtfully construed. Few general counsel, perhaps none, deliberately experiment with a management method and try to learn from the outcome. Some of them try all sorts of things but they don’t set up control groups, gather data over time, reduce variables, and adhere…