John Lukacs, The Future of History (Yale 2011) at 43-44, disparages what he calls “quanto-history,” the effort to gather data and apply statistical tools in the service of historical knowledge. What others have called “Cliometrics” – Clio being the goddess of history – lack reliable data and, worse, focus on…
Ten posts from June 2011 that struck me as the most interesting Internal and external billing rates, combined with the ratio of internal to external spend, suggests one-to-one lawyer hours (June 2, 2011) Some billing rate and spend calculations suggest one outside counsel hour for every in-house lawyer hour. A…
We make the estimate by multiplying lawyers per billion dollars of market value against the world-wide total of market capitalization and then dividing by the average number of lawyers in law departments. Perhaps the result is directionally correct. From four posts on this blog, let’s loosely estimate lawyers per billion…
Many times on this blog I have compiled lists but I have never sat back and thought about lists. For this post, a list doesn’t simply note elements, such as “the ten articles I wrote in 2010.” Here, I mean the result of someone thinking about a situation and coming…
In The Future of History (Yale 2011), John Lukacs traces the shift in historical scholarship over the past 250 years from aristocratic history – great men fighting great battles for great politics – to social history – a profoundly more democratic study of people of all walks and circumstances of…
This idée fixe of mine has roots far back in this blog. A sample of the reasons why I doubt the existence of “best practices” gives me an opportunity to rehearse some of my arguments. A pattern of more and more law departments doing something hardly proves that the something…
Among the arguments in a solid book that disagrees with the current worries about America losing its competitive edge, Amar Bhidé, The Venturesome Economy: how innovation sustains prosperity in a more connected world (Princeton Univ. 2008) at 162-179, puts forth seven concerns with off-shoring. Each of them resonates with some…
The mantra for managers: if work can be delegated to a lower-cost, capable person, strive to do so. While that sounds good, still I mused about the $200 an hour Associate General Counsel (using a fully-loaded cost per hour that shouldn’t take anyone back) who delegates a task to a…
An earlier foray into erroneous thinking about one kind of software left a lot of flawed thinking to cover (See my post of Sept. 5, 2005: myths of matter management systems.). Here I have generalized common technology-related mis-perceptions. The hard part is selection. Wrong: the tough sledding comes when getting…
Larger law departments, those with say fifteen or more lawyers, tend to be in companies with equivalently more revenue. Since economies of scale in legal spending benefit those larger departments, surveys whose participants are skewed toward large companies will produce distorted, lower benchmarks (See my post of Dec. 16, 2010:…