How easily people process what they perceive has a term in human factors research: load. There is “cognitive load,” meaning that when a dashboard, for example, takes a lot of thinking or remembering to make sense, it has high load. “Visual load” refers to what Prof. Edward Tufte would call…
From an article in the Harvard Bus. Rev., Sept. 2011 at 70, comes a three-part definition of complexity. “The first, multiplicity, refers to the number of potentially interacting elements. The second, interdependence, relates to how connected those elements are. The third, diversity, has to do with the degree of their…
“In 2010 alone, NPEs filed 550 [patent suits] at a total cost of $7 billion to the defendant companies, according to defensive patent aggregator RPX Corp.” The quote comes from Intellectual Prop., Fall 2011 at 25. Does that mean last year the defendants in those suits paid $7 billion in…
People in legal departments who want to make sense out of the large volume of data generated by their various software programs, notably their matter management system, have several choices for how to dig through and make sense of that data. Open source software called Hadoop lets users sift through…
A survey of US legal departments about electronic data discovery (EDD), conducted by ALM Legal Intelligence for T. Wade Welch & Associates, produced findings in a supplement to the September issue of Corporate Counsel. In a previous post I picked at the sample size, but nevertheless I want to point…
“For matters valued under $500,000, 71% of in-house counsel said they try to do as much EDD [electronic data discovery] as possible in-house.” This quote comes from research by ALM Legal Intelligence sponsored by T. Wade Welch & Associates, published in a supplement to the September issue of Corporate Counsel.…
According to this London-based company’s website and ads, GTDTonline provides in-house counsel with summaries of laws and regulations in 43 practice areas and more than 120 jurisdictions. The summaries explain “the most important legal and regulatory matters that arise in business deals and disputes worldwide.” In-house counsel are eligible for…
Those who manage in-house lawyers should have a framework for how to assess potential rates of productivity increase. In the August issue of Strategy + Business, at 33, Booz & Company states that during the 20 years from 1987 to 2008, US manufacturers increased productivity at a cumulative annual growth…
An announcement about the changing of the guard at the Association of Corporate Counsel mentioned that during one person’s tenure large law department memberships had increased 89 percent. Wow, impressive! Wait! We don’t actually know whether that is impressive. The release did not state the time period or the starting…
Based on 245 U.S. law departments that have participated so far in the General Counsel Metrics global benchmark survey, as well as 36 Canadian law departments, and 113 from the rest of the world, here are three ratios: 3 lawyers for every paralegal in the United States and the same…