We take for granted that fundamental terms in benchmark surveys and reports have clear meanings understood and applied by all. Lord, what fools these mortals be! Setting aside statistical terms, below are 12 that deserve careful definition by surveyors and scrupulous adherence by respondents so that benchmark metrics may be…
“82 per cent of respondents [to the survey referenced below] indicated that their organisation’s disputes are resolved by negotiated settlement. Five years ago this figure was 74 percent.” The quote comes from The In-House Perspective, April 2011 at 13, which cites Deloitte & Touche’s “Forensic Corporate Counsel Survey 2010: do…
Every now and then I run across another association of law firms eager to help law departments in a region, a specialty area of law, or globally (See my post of Feb. 21, 2008 #2: law-firm networks with 7 references; and April 14, 2010: associations with 7 references.). First Law…
Several times in the past I have pointed out the swarm of vendors and service providers who market to legal departments. They make up the cottage industry. In the past year or so, several more posts provide information about more denizens of the cottage. Most concern those who license, implement…
The 409 companies so far in the General Counsel Metrics (GCM) global survey report that all together they have 9,900 lawyers (median 7) and 8,212 other legal staff (median 6), which includes paralegals. Their combined legal spend totals $10.2 billion (with a median of $5.6 million) and the revenue of…
An indicator of your law department’s attachment to a law firm is the number of offices of a firm that you work with. According to Baker & McKenzie, it pulled in $2.1 billion in 2010, “half of it from clients that use the firm in ten or more places.” This…
When you rely on someone else’s summary of research, you might be dealing with a bad translation. Even so, this summary statement of a survey finding caught my attention: “82 percent of respondents [to the survey described below] reported an increase in regulatory activity within the past year. The most…
When we measure something, such as the time it takes to review advertising brochures, what takes place? As the author David Deutsch writes, “One can claim to have measured a quantity only when one has an explanatory theory of how and why the measurement procedure should reveal its value, and…
Some legal problems left in baskets on the doorstep of a law department come from the corporate compliance line. Hotlines, as they are called, generate some wheat for lawyers but mostly chaff. This post offers some snippets I have gathered about help lines. From a small sample of experience, it…
The Harvard Bus. Rev., Sept. 2011 at 75, discusses a way to deal with complexity through what the authors call triangulation – “using different methodologies, making different assumptions, collecting different data, or looking at the same data different ways.” To understand a complex situation it helps to triangulate from multiple…