Economists often refer to changes that are cyclical, meaning that there is some regularity in the pattern of change and reversion, and changes that are structural. Structural changes are permanent, profound, often take effect gradually, and are sometimes hard to identify at the time. For example the demographic change of…
To lessen the influence of outliers, a set of numbers can be Winsorized. Named after Charles Winsor, to Winsorize data, tail values at the extremes are set equal to some specified percentile of the data, such as plus and minus four standard deviations. Here’s how it’s done. For a 90…
Bet the company lit (See my post of Oct. 27, 2011: bet-the-company with 8 references.). Fulbright litigation survey (See my post of Nov. 26, 2011: F&J litigation survey with 21 references.). Leadership II (See my post of Oct. 19, 2011: leadership with 10 references.). Legal research online by law firms…
Chaos theory studies phenomenon where small changes in the initial conditions result in major changes in consequences (a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil famously results in a hurricane off Bermuda). As used for physical systems, chaos events are non-linear: they are not wildly unpredictable and mysterious – the popular…
Economists would distill the corporate legal market into the DEMAND by corporations for legal services and the SUPPLY of those services. Demand, what drives legal services, has been a topic returned to more than a few time on this blog (See my post of July 2, 2007: what drives a…
Many posts on this blog have dipped into the well of the annual Fulbright & Jaworski surveys of litigation data. Each year the firm polls a few more than 400 law departments in the United States and the United Kingdom. If the responding group year after year remains significantly similar…
Scientists call artifacts “observations in their research that are produced entirely by some aspect of the method of research,” as explained by Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2011) at 110. Artifacts, weeds in the gardens of benchmarks, crop up when how the data is collected…
In addition to General Counsel Metrics (GC Metrics), three U.S. organizations collect data from law departments and produce benchmark metrics for all to purchase. ACC/Empsight, American Lawyer Media (ALM), and HBR Consulting set submission deadlines in the late summer and produce their reports a month or two later. On that…
Bob Santamaria is profiled in Asia-MENA Counsel, Vol. 9, Issue 7 at 40, Santamaria being the Group General Counsel of ANZ Bank, the third largest in Australia. He estimates that ANZ now has around forty-five lawyers across some thirty jurisdictions who work alongside the remainder of the team back home.…
Jeff Schuett, the VP and GM of LexisNexis CounselLink, contributed an article to Met. Corp. Counsel, Nov. 2011 at 30. He writes “Corporate litigation costs have grown 75 percent over the past ten years – even at a time when overall costs rose just 20 percent.” Schuett doesn’t give the…