A presentation recently by Ralph Schroeder of Hyperion Research Group listed the ten most common key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics used in intellectual asset management (IAM). Eight of them made complete sense to me, but two left me with questions. “Number of own patents v. competition” was one of…
Just shy of 300 participating law departments, the GCM benchmark survey has collected responses from 114 of them regarding their matter management system. In declining order of mention, the providers of such software were Mitratech (19), Serengeti (12), LawTrac (8), CT Tymetrix (7), EAG (6), Bridgeway (4), Datacert (4) and…
In Fortune, June 13, 2011 at 69, Roger Parloff plunges deep into the secretive world of third-party litigation financing. Mostly he drills down on the Chevron case in Ecuador and one major financer. What he finds is not pretty and it is certainly far from transparent. Along the way he…
“A claim is said to be objective if its truth or falsity can be settled as a matter of fact independent of anybody’s attitudes, feelings or evaluations; it is subjective if it cannot. For example, the claim that Van Gogh died in France is epistemically objective. But the claim that…
When I heard this statement from a keynote speaker, I felt the urge to stop, drop and role. I was fired up, smoke coming out of my ears! The statement fails utterly to recognize the huge differences that can follow from a cost-plus operation by law firms where everything spent…
In the Fall of 2010 ALM Legal Intelligence administered an online survey that 176 US in-house lawyers took. LexisNexis CounselLink published the findings. In them respondents indicated whether or not they were “Instituting a 360° review process for all law firms”. I blinked 360 times. A full-circle review suggests that…
A recent survey of 176 law departments found that at least half of them say they demonstrate value to their companies by “implementing knowledge management systems.” That finding troubles me, for three reasons. Demonstrating value cannot mean listing all the things you do in your department. Not all activities create…
From a presentation at the SuperConference, someone threw out the PIE theory of career success. They credit that theory with a quantification of what contributes to an upward career trajectory. I quote from the slide: “‘P’ for performance: it accounts for 10% of success ‘I’ for image: 30% of success…
My usual comments about titles in legal departments culminate in something about Associate Counsel being senior or junior to Assistant Counsel. That pair of titles seems quite common, and usually in that order of ascendancy. But the title stepping-stones for the home office attorneys at Allstate sit quite differently. From…
People bang on about why it is hard for a law firm to re-orient itself away from piling up billable hours, relying on old technology, not unbundling services handled better and cheaper by others, and so on in the litany of changes resisted. Law departments, too, move very slowly. Only…