“I observe that when we mention any great number, such as a thousand, the mind has generally no adequate idea of it, but only a power of producing such an idea by its adequate idea of the decimals, under which the number is comprehended.” Stanislas Dehaene, The Number Sense: how…
At 219 claimed participants in the 2011 HBR consulting metrics report, the number has dropped, since press releases in the past make much of increases (See my post of Oct. 20, 2010: HildebrandtBakerRobbins press release stated 10% increase in participants.). (There is no mention of what number of those 219…
Some bias comes built into these results since 70 percent of 54 departments responding to a recent survey belong to the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA). ILTA’s 2011 Law Department Technology Survey gathered data in December 2010. It found that for legal departments with 50 or more attorneys, 78 percent…
QR (Quick Response) codes are everywhere these days. A QR code (in effect a barcode for mobile phones) will link to a piece of text, a phone number, an SMS message or URL. Law department lawyers will increasingly see them in publications. For vendors and law firms the URL is…
Astonishing news, this. Bloomberg announced yesterday that five partners (partners!) from Willkie Farr & Gallagher will become part of the existing Bloomberg legal team, effective January 1, 2012. One of them, Dick DeScherer, will become Chief Legal Officer. I can’t fathom the economics and logic of this massive move. Here…
If you are the head employment lawyer for EMEA and are promoted to global employment lawyer, certainly your scale of responsibility expands. You have more people reporting to you, a larger budget, more locations to visit, additional laws and regulations to consider, but you are essentially doing the same things…
Scrupulous surveyors know that if one person answers all the questions, the methodological concern for “response bias” lurks. Better data comes from multiple sources. Rather than have only the administrator of a legal department, for example, answer questions about practices in a law department – numeric answers are not as…
Part of Pfizer’s arrangements with its Alliance firms are evaluations of those firms. According to the ACC Docket, July/Aug. 2011 at 80, Pfizer lawyers are supposed to go online to complete evaluation forms, which include an opportunity to write in comments. In my experience, evaluations by in-house lawyers of their…
Why is “bet the company litigation” (aka “bet-the-company litigation”) consistently among the most popular search terms for those who arrive at my blog? On October 26th I looked on SiteMeter under Referring Search Words Ranked by Visits. Number one (13 searches) was the unhyphenated version and number seven (8 searches)…
“Increasingly, professional errors – across fields and disciplines – stem not from lack of ability or ignorance, but from ineptitude: situations in which ‘the knowledge exists, yet we fail to apply it correctly.’” In-house counsel should heed this observation, and its follow-on recommendation: use checklists. Checklists have a “forcing function”…