In a June 2010 report, Jomati Consultants includes a chart to show that U.S. partners put up their rates on average by 4.9 percent each year between 1997 and 2007. Associate rates went up by 5.4 percent on average each of those years. Since a typical U.S. legal department spent…
It’s not crowdsourcing, quite, but the potential can be seen for lawyers to use computer databases to augment their own inputs. One precedent for this we already know: document assembly. With that genre of software, input from a user allows the database to put together a document or answer a…
An article in the Acad. Mgt. J., Vol. 53 (2010) at 701-722, analyzes why corporate prominence may lead to a higher incidence of corporate illegality. The authors studied 194 S&P 500 manufacturing firms between 1990 and 1999. They searched databases for references to what they defined as corporate illegality and…
What can be said usefully in 1,500 words on matter management systems? Lots of vendors and consultants can’t clear their throat in that space – “huge forces at work,” “GCs under huge pressure,” “need for information and insight,” “costs spiraling out of control.” I tried to write my National Law…
The latest submission in my series features Eric Blankenship, the veteran leader of EAG’s matter management system offering. “Founded in 1986, EAG specializes in providing matter management software to corporate legal departments, and litigation consulting services to banks, insurance companies, securities firms and individual investors. CaseTrack was first introduced in…
In a variation on the tort doctrine of the thin-skull plaintiff, those who care about metrics and measurement have to accept that most people, including in-house lawyers, become befuddled around very large numbers. Our cognitive capabilities didn’t evolve to let us toss off millions and billions with confidence and intuitive…
More than 20% of Canadian lawyers are in-house. CCCA Magazine, in its Fall 2011 issue at 7, has a piece by the Chair of the trade group, Geoffrey Creighton. He writes that “more and more legal practitioners in Canada are working as in-house counsel” and a sentence later that “Some…
One of the questions Major, Lindsey & Africa, the executive search firm, asked in-house respondents in a survey was to check which of eight topics interested them. The third-most checked topic was “New technology for legal departments.” Let me riff on that. Three variations on the central idea of technology…
Brian Armstrong, the progressive general counsel of Canada’s Bruce Power, was informative and candid about his efforts to demonstrate the performance and value of his department. His 200-page annual report is a compendium of nearly every metric imaginable, according to the long profile of him in CCCA Magazine, Fall 2011…
Some things to do differently on the second iteration of a fixed-fee arrangement (Sept. 5, 2011) Four recommendations for what to do differently to improve the second process and outcome. Social-choice theory, Arrow’s impossibility theorem, and group decision-making (Sept. 5, 2011) Kenneth Arrow laid down five elementary axioms that any…