Early next year, General Counsel Metrics will produce a breakthrough analysis of matter management software (MMS) in light of law department benchmark metrics. Along with the quantitative insights, there will be assembled my MMS posts from this blog. There are today 143 of them, all organized into five topical areas,…
SiteMeter brought to my attention an oddity about this blog. Far and away, the most read post by numbers of visits was one that I published on March 22, 2006. This blockbuster has attracted 134 visits, dwarfing the next most frequently visited post that had only 79 visits. I believe…
(1) Some people maintain that “risk” is not an independent something waiting to be measured. It is, instead, completely definitional, situational, cultural, and malleable. As part of this argument, think about all the ways a “legal risk” might be described: delay, money lost, reputation besmirched, time wasted, share value diminished,…
Much has been made about expertise being the payoff of 10,000+ hours of disciplined, thoughtful practice (See my post of June 12, 2005: Herbert Simon’s 10-year rule on expertise; July 15, 2005: how to increase “deep smarts.”; Nov. 6, 2006: effortful study over time, plus motivation; Jan. 18, 2007: concentrated…
In-house lawyers want respect and they want to be dealt with by their colleagues as a peer. If they are mostly Vice Presidents but their business colleagues are dotted with Senior Vice Presidents and Executive Vice Presidents, the perceived demeanment at best is an irritation but at worst precludes them…
One of the consistent attacks on the rational homo economicus is that we so often fail to let our judgments of probability stay close to an informative statistic, referred to by cognitive researchers as a “base rate.” If you were asked the average number of lawyers in the AmLaw 200…
A general counsel who subscribes pointed me to Knowledge Mosaic. Its website proclaims that subscribers can search more than 90,000 memos from law firms covering 46 different practice areas. If true, that is an astounding collection of legal guidance and interpretation available on the Internet, albeit for a subscription fee.…
The more arguments you come up with to support your decision, the less confident you will be that the decision is correct. Doesn’t that disturb you, as someone who prides yourself on thinking honestly, objectively and thoroughly about what positions to take? Yet the psychological paradox has been well researched,…
Once a number is put on the table, it can exert an untoward effect on those around the table. The “anchoring effect” of the first number put forward in a negotiation or discussion powerfully, yet often unconsciously, shifts both sides closer to that number. Even wholly unrelated anchors weigh down…
If a single partner at a law firm accounts for more than 75 percent of the firm’s partner-level billings, it would be safe to say that the partner has the ear of the law department, not the firm as a whole. The more partners bill the client, the deeper the…