Articles Posted in This Blog

For the 30 days preceding July 24, 2011, SiteMeter shows the web pages ranked by visitors they directed to my blog. Towering over all other sites is Law.com (245 referrals), in part reflecting the fact that this blog stands as one of the Law.com blog family and my posts circulate on its heavily-trafficed site. Next comes the fine blog of Geoff Gussis, In-House Blog (89 referrals) and, to my surprise, Twitter (62). Twitter has steadily increased as a source of visitors over the past year.

Joe Bookman’s PinHawk (44) comes in fourth and then this blog itself (41). My laboriously created back references take no credit; TypePad’s suggestions of related posts account for most of them.

The next five referral sites include LinkedIn (34), my website (27), ReesMorrison.com, in part because it runs my five most recent posts, ITDatabase (12), the bankruptcy news aggregator BK Information (6), and StumbleUpon (6). I am not sure what StumbleUpon is or does, but I welcome the leads.

Charles Darwin scrupulously tried to address the criticisms he recognized would follow the publication of his revelations on evolution. He bent over backwards to honor all attacks he could anticipate. That style, once called the “habit of sympathetic summary,” philosophers now refer to as the “principle of charity.”

Summarize a counterargument to your own point in its strongest form, according to Adam Gopnik, Angels and Ages: A short book about Darwin, Lincoln and modern life (Knopf 2009) at 104. As he writes, so should bloggers follow: “The principle of charity is to make the other guy’s argument look good (therefore making yours look even better).”

Posts on this blog run on the short side, which makes them easier to organize, write, and read. That said, brevity makes it harder to acknowledge and charitably address opposing points. I will make more of an effort to think of and comment on contrary views, or at least state them in full and credible form. All too little of such deliberate and mature debate takes place in the field of legal department operations.

If you would like to receive my no-cost newsletters, click on the notice to the right and enter your name and e-mail address. This issue went to 367 subscribers.

As with my previous newsletters, I looked to my readers to decide what to write about. The spoke through Feedburner, which identified the ten posts published in the thirty days between June 5th and July 4th that had the most views and clicks. During that time, there were 18,421 total views of 389 posts as well as 11,905 click-backs to read 1,184 posts.

My newsletter republishes the top-ten posts in declining order of the total views plus clicks. Additionally, I offer two comments about each post. The newsletter comes to nine pages of material.

And the seasons they go round and round, so I combed through the 120 posts that I picked in the last twelve months as the best of a month. That covered the posts of June 2010 through June 2011. My goal was to code the posts and then see what patterns they disclose, to build on my analysis of the first annual batch (See my post of July 5, 2010: analysis of first year of best posts – outside counsel; July 5, 2010: thinking; July 5, 2010: metrics; and July 6, 2010: shortage of posts on clients and technology.).

This time, outside counsel posts again led the pack, with 25, followed again by posts on decision-making and thinking, with 20. The former topic appeals to many of my readers, both inside and outside of law departments. In third place were productivity methods or tools, with 17 posts. In the first year there were not nearly as many on those topics or I coded differently. Surprising me were the 13 posts on what I coded as theory: high level thoughts on management of legal departments.

Following theory in frequency were metrics (10), technology (9) – unlike last year, costs (9) and talent (6). Maybe it is my selection criteria, maybe my off-the-cuff coding, but the two years of “best posts” do show significant differences.

Here are my choices for the most interesting posts from two months ago.

Sorry, it’s perfectly fine if a firm sets a fee based on estimated hours of work (May 8, 2011)

Estimated hours represent a solid basis for a flat fee. Moreover, a flat fee, however derived, differs enormously from hourly fees.

Just shy of three years after I started this blog, I realized that I had created at least 10 metaposts – collections of at least six posts on a topic. So, on Feb. 3, 2008, I published my first group of what I called embedded metaposts, and published three more in quick succession. The “embedded” referred to the fact that I was simultaneously saving related posts in a Word file, but these assemblages were embedded and published in the blog itself. About 18 months later I tried, briefly, to combine related metaposts into what I called MetaPost Plus (See my post of June 29, 2009: my first effort at Metapost Pluses.).

Seven months ago my pile of metaposts numbered 523, citing 6,807 back references (See my post of Nov. 27, 2010: retrospective on metaposts.) having increased from 420 during the year (See my post of Jan. 29, 2010: commentary on the 420 metaposts as of then.).

During 2005 nine metaposts appeared (although they and subsequent metaposts remained unnamed and unnoticed until early 2008); 2006 saw 16 more; and 2007 increased the pace to 41. The next year jumped to 157 metaposts, but 2009 eclipsed that number completely: 203 metaposts. The pace fell off during 2010 (108 metaposts) and so far this year there have been 57. Overall, they average 13 references per metapost. The total in my Excel database of metaposts equals 592 but since I just put up Part LVI, there should be 610.

1. Claims management (See my post of June 14, 2011: management of claims with 11 references.).

2. Contracts work core to in-house counsel (See my post of June 16, 2011: core function of inside lawyers is contracts with 13 references.).

3. Contract practices (See my post of June 14, 2011: practices related to contracts with 23 references.).

For online, tech-savvy lawyers of law departments, one of the ways to keep abreast is Twitter. For example, the posts on this blog appear there under my Twitter handle @ReesMorrison. The headers and text compress automatically through some magical software that I don’t pretend to understand.

With somewhat fewer followers (435) than say, Justin Timberlake, I was startled to find that during the month preceding June 18th, 17 people had seen fit to retweet 38 of my posts. They say something short and usually complimentary and refer to one of my posts compacted into a tweet. They signal a retweet with via@ReesMorrison or RT@reesmorrison. A couple had even retweeted a retweet.

Among those who have retweeted one of my posts are Gaston Bilder, Brad Bjelke, Toby Brown, Jeffrey Brandt, Tim Corcoran, Ron Friedmann, Jordan Furlong, Jonathan Kash, Aric Press, Sally Schmidt, Allen Simpson, Gavin Ward, Christopher Wills, and Roddy Young, I thank them for their efforts and recognition.

Studies have shown that conservative bloggers cite other conservative blogs and include links to them in their blog rolls; liberal bloggers likewise segregate their references and citations. This point Cass Sunstein makes in Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge (Oxford 2006) at 190.

A test of this proposition would be the set of blogs I have identified as written by current or former in-house counsel on law department operations (See my post of Jan. 28, 2009: law department management blawgs with 11 references; May 16, 2011: blawgs by in-house lawyers past or present with 16 references.).

If someone assembled all the blog rolls of the site and counted them, it would probably show a core of blogs that frequently cite and link to each other as well as a long tail of infrequent sites.

An article in the Acad. Mgt. Learning & Ed., March 2011 at 41, distinguishes between “explanatory sciences and design sciences. The explanatory paradigm, as predominately followed in business schools, is concerned with understanding what is, while design science (as predominates in medicine and engineering) is concerned with what should be. Design science is concerned with developing knowledge that provides answers to problems.” I flatter myself that this blog both explains law department operations as well as provides some solutions to operational problems.

Little Bets: How breakthrough ideas emerge from small discoveries, by Peter Sims (Free Press 2011), at 12, 28, makes the case for “design thinking” as “a set of creative methodologies for solving problems and generating ideas that is based on building up solutions, rather than starting with the answer.” Design thinking works particularly well with complex, ill-structured problems. Design thinking sounds just right for some complicated legal tasks.