Law departments want to generate value. What is the value of an acquisition? The amount paid to buy a company may be clear, but the worth of the deal depends in part on how far out you look. What is the value of a license agreement? Projected revenue? Possibly, but…
Patrick Dransfield, the Publishing Director of Pacific Business Press, suggested another ploy of prestigious firms, and he called it bundling. This blog has referred to unbundling as the practice of taking away from law firms some tasks that others can do better, cheaper, or both. Dransfield sees it like an…
Self-help best-sellers (“You can be anything you want to be if you [do this magical thing]!!”) leave me more than a bit cynical so it was with considerable interest that I read in the NY Times, Nov. 27, 2011 at SR8, about willpower. It’s hard for in-house counsel to slog…
General counsel would do well to ponder two contrarian points made recently about leadership. A commentary on the latest book by Jim Collins, Great by Choice, in the Economist, Nov. 26, 2011 at 80, refers to two common beliefs that he challenges. Collins does not believe that “turbulent times call…
Two websites are particularly well known for analyzing politician’s statements for accuracy, FactCheck and PolitiFact. Reading about them in the Economist, Nov. 26, 2011 at 43, I found myself wishing there were equivalents for articles about law department management (or blogs, for that matter). In some measure I have cast…
When you hear of a statistical finding, you should want to understand that number’s reliability. If the research that produced the number were repeated several times, how much would the results vary? Consider an example. Let’s make the simplifying assumption that the participants in the GC Metrics benchmark survey make…
Metrics from small law departments exhibit much more variability than the same metrics from large law departments. For example, from one year to the next, outside counsel spending per lawyer will swing higher or lower for law departments with one-to-three lawyers than for departments with 20+ lawyers. The explanation, drawn…
More law department sales. Vendors, let me know of your successes. I still hope to announce license arrangements. So, to prime the pump, note that LexisNexis CounselLink was chosen by Fannie Mae and Hawaiian Electric, according to Met. Corp. Counsel, Nov. 2011 at 41. Arguments by analogy are fallacies. “Almost…
Our evolution equipped us to create causal explanations for events much more readily than to grasp underlying statistical explanations, to use the terms of Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2011). Causal explanations, often in the form of a narrative, explain what has happened by people…
Early in the data collection this year for the GC Metrics benchmark survey, 69 law departments stated how many years they had been using their matter management system. The average number of years those departments had had their system installed was 6.4 years. Later, with 652 law departments in the…