This blog has described what psychologists call the halo effect (See my post of April 13, 2007: “the tendency to make specific inferences on the basis of a general impression.”). Stylish clothes improve the assessments we make of the wearer’s unrelated attributes. Good looking people get the benefit of being…
For several years, law departments with matter management systems have struggled to adapt (contort?) those systems to handle the various volume discount arrangements the departments craft. One law firm might have a tiered discount arrangement, another has very different tiers, while a third triggers retroactive discounts at some level and…
The new general counsel for the North American operations of the Rilin Group, a China-based sea transportation and wind-power company, had previously been a court of claims judge in New York State. Robert Holdman resigned because he could not afford to remain in the $135,700 a year judicial position. This…
Describing new developments in CounselLink, Jeff Schuett, its VP and GM at LexisNexis described one particular addition that deserves note from Met. Corp. Counsel, Nov. 2011 at 30. The matter management software has a new feature that “can support existing agreements, allowing clients to publish the billing rules, manage the…
An essential attribute of a good lawyer is the ability to think clearly. It appears, however, that whatever goes on inside a human’s brain when it is processing input has two radically different personas: an impulsive, intuitive, impressionable, pattern-creating function and a more deliberate, evaluative, orderly and demanding function. Hence…
In Charles Seife, Proofiness: How you’re being fooled by the numbers (Penguin 2010) at 108, a point is made that has bearing on the survey instruments in the header and their findings. “When surveys and polls depend on voluntary response, it’s almost always the case that people with strong opinions…
Cognitive psychologists generally believe that ideas, somehow and by some means not yet fathomed, surface or are created from a neural network of associative memories. This view is according to Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2011) at Chapter 4. Our first reaction to something, what…
The ALM benchmark survey, released in September, covers 99 companies. The average number of law firms employed in 2010 by the subset of those companies earning between $1 billion and $4.9 billion was 43. Very roughly, that revenue range typically corresponds to 5-25 lawyers in-house. If 10 were the mid-point,…
Sylvia Nasar describes a remarkable theory and empirical finding by the Nobel Laureate economist, Robert Solow: “Nine-tenths of the doubling in output per worker in the United States between 1909 and 1949 was due neither to the accumulation of physical plant nor to improvements in the health or education of…
An idea, possibly daft, occurred to me regarding disclosures mandated by the SEC. Would that agency conclude that investors would benefit from having comparative data on legal spend? Would that information materially help the equity markets? If so, would it have the power to require listed U.S. companies to state…