Law Department Management Blog
A cartogram is a map which resizes countries or states according to certain data; it shows political boundaries from the data’s point of view. This method of data visualization appears in the Harv. Bus. Rev., Vol. 86, March 2009 at 112. The example is a map that shows the size of countries according to several factors related to their innovation efforts: R&D spending, the number of postsecondary degrees awarded, and the number of patents issued.
Imagine a cartogram of the United States that shows the state with the largest number of in-house counsel as the biggest state, the next by number of in-house counsel as the second biggest and so on. Or, imagine a map of the world that shows countries in proportion to how many lawyers they have who are part of US law departments. One more example: instead of columns of different heights rising from states of the United States, to indicate the number of cases pending or the amount spent in the previous year, why not create a cartogram? The possibilities are endless for matching geography to data.