Do you have blazoned on your office wall “for every dollar you spend, the company’s sales force has to generate $10 of additional revenue to cover that expense”? The authors, writing in ACC Docket, Nov. 2010 at 81, actually mean “profit,” not “revenue” but the point remains dramatic. If plus…
Part LIX in a series of collected metaposts embedded previously Alternative billing arrangements (See my post of Aug. 23, 2011: AFA posts since early 2009 with 35 references.). Brainstorming II (See my post of Sept. 15, 2011: brainstorming with 6 references.). Internal budgets III (See my post of Sept. 7,…
A recent article has much to say about non-practicing entities (NPEs). I have cherry picked from it and quoted several paragraphs. “Some 20 of the 300 or so known NPEs appear to account for roughly half of all NPE-related litigations, according to intelligence from Patent Freedom (www.patentfreedom.com). In 2008 alone,…
Judge Richard Posner, the prolific Circuit Court judge, was interviewed by the New York Rev. of Books, Sept. 29, 2011 at 49. Asked about the ages of appellate judges and their effectiveness in their seventies and eighties, Posner offered his obiter dicta: “I think for anybody in a management job,…
For those of you who think that a law department needs to have some minimum number of lawyers to justify licensing a matter management system, you are right! But the number is one lawyer. I looked at 125 law departments in the General Counsel Metrics benchmark survey that have licensed…
Improvisation techniques applied to members of a brainstorming group have much value, judging from a sidebar in Rotman Mag., Fall 2011 at 18. For example, (1) identify a leader, someone who is empowered to keep an eye on the group and its dynamics. (2) Use “build on the ideas of…
General counsel deserve to have good, reliable, and useful benchmark figures. Many people try to supply that need. All of them face some systemic unknowns about the representativeness of the law departments that participate in their surveys. Centralized departments: For example, data may be less common from decentralized legal functions…
Return on investment, the calculations that justify spending money, figure prominently in decisions by law department managers – or they ought to. Being so important, many posts on this blog aim directly at ROI or refer to it and it has become time for me to invest in updating my…
Metrics and benchmarks provide opportunities for sleight of hand, for tricks that fool some people, for willful ambiguities, and for dumb decisions. Here are eight candidates for booby prizes other than samples that are not representative and questions that are not neutral. Frame the findings with “save up to” or…
For many managers, if a way of working gets the job done, who cares why? It makes no difference to them what the cause is, underlying explanations for the reliable outcome, the reasons behind decisions, tools, and management that brings the outcome about. This view is known as instrumentalism, and…