The first 100 or so participants in 2012 in the General Counsel Metrics industry benchmark survey were eager to take part, as demonstrated by how quickly they did so. Do their metrics look fundamentally different from last year’s final group of 840, which clearly had some late-in-the-season participants? No, most…
We urge you to click on this survey link and take a few minutes to enter your 2011 staff numbers as well as your internal and external legal spend. The first 105 participants in this year’s General Counsel Metrics industry benchmark survey let me start to gauge the eventual group.…
We often use the term “equals” very loosely. “Her matter load is equal to his.” “Our paralegals-per-billion-of revenue is equal to the median for our industry.” In my column Morrison on Metrics: “Lies told by the equals sign,” I point out that “equal” rarely means what we think when we…
In-house lawyers do most of their reading, listening, and giving advice – their primary ways of learning – within a relatively narrow cone of their practice areas. Further, while seated at their desk they do most of this. Time and facilities don’t permit otherwise, they would remonstrate. That rigidity takes…
Two schools of thought about ethics afford us a different way to think about value delivered by law firms. Consequentialism is the ethical view that what is right is what brings about good results. That is the summary in A.C. Grayling, Ideas that Matter: the concepts that shape the 21st…
The Am. Scholar, Spring 2012 at 66, reveals how we read. Our eyes make hops, known as saccades, and for the 20 to 30 milliseconds of each we do not perceive anything, and then they fixate for 200 to 300 milliseconds. Thus, the absolute fastest any of us can read…
This quote, “leadership involves a delicate combination of plumbing and poetry,” struck me when James March spoke it during an interview (Acad. Mgt. Learning & Ed., Sept. 2011 at 504). Law department leaders have to get the basics rights, the water flowing and the heat heating. Contract review, timely filings,…
A fascinating chapter in a recent book on natural experiments in history explains our country’s history of so-called free banking (anyone could set up a bank, rather than have to get government approval). According to Jared Diamond and James A. Robinson, Eds., Natural Experiments in History (Harvard Univ. 2010) at…
A previous post has used this cornerstone of statistics, the Central Limit Theorem, but did not explain it fully (See my post of July 30, 2011: the Central Limit Theory.). In George G. Szpiro, Pricing the Future: finance, physics, and the 300-year journey to the Black-Scholes equation (Basic Books 2011)…
A.C. Grayling, Ideas that Matter: the concepts that shape the 21st century (Basic Books 2010) at 63 discusses business ethics. Grayling states, matter of factly, that “the boundaries of legal permission in all capitalist economies lie outside those of moral acceptability.” If that statement is correct, that what lawyers can…