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The stenograph transcription industry (generally referred to as the “court reporting” industry) has more than 4,000 companies (sometimes called “agencies”), 40,000 reporters, and annual revenue of more than $2 billion. Most court reporters are hired by the litigation partner at the law firm that represents the company.

Some of the leading providers of court reporting services include Alderson Reporting, Atkinson-Baker, Compex Legal Services, Hobart-West Group, Knipes-Cohen, LiveNote Technologies, Pro-Systems Court Reporting, US Legal Support, Veritext, and WordWave.

I have written previously about e-billing services (See my post of Aug. 21, 2005 that distinguishes e-billing from matter management.), but have not collected in one post the names of leading vendors. Those names follow, along with some posts related to them.

This blog has reported on data from many of the vendors in this field, which include Allegiant (May 1, 2005 about its ROI claims.); BottomLine Technologies (Nov. 15, 2005 and law firm performance data.); CT Tymetrix (Aug. 21, 2005 about Convex.); DataCert (Sept. 13, 2005, which cites Eric Elfman, its President.); Examen (Jan. 4, 2006 on its surveys.); and Serengeti (April 5, Aug. 5, as well as Nov. 6 and 8, 2005 on its surveys).

A practice is a set of actions — a process (See my post of April 27, 2006 on legal department processes.) — that a law department carries out time after time. A concept is an understanding or a set of beliefs that animates a law department in its practices. Confusingly, practices and concepts sometimes overlap.

Some illustrations: A concept is to review the bills of outside counsel, which sounds like a practice, but there are finer practices such as having a paralegal check the math and the responsible lawyer decide about value. A concept is to compare your performance to that of your peers; associated practices are to buy a survey or collect data from a set of participants. A concept is to heighten competition among law firms that seek your business; practices that might translate that concept into action include competitive bidding and online auctions (See my post of Sept. 4, 2000 on electronic auctions.).

Hence, practices implement a concept, even though a concept that is not expressed as an action is hard to imagine. The law department practice that has no concept behind it is equally hard to conceive

Econometrics is a self-consciously empirical approach to economics that blends theory, measurement, and statistical techniques. Taking the same approach are academic jurists who belong to the empirical legal studies movement (See my posts of Oct. 23, 2005 regarding this discipline yet the dearth of academics who study law departments.).

Unfortunately, few academics have applied these disciplines to law departments (See my post of May 5, 2006 with some isolated examples.). My book Law Department Benchmarks: Myths, Metrics, and Management (Glasser LegalWorks 2nd Ed.2001), collects as many metrics as I could find, but it hardly qualifies as an empirical study of law departments. Journalists are not adept at theories, metrics, or statistics (See my post of Dec. 14, 2005 about journalists and their desire to spot “trends.”). Even consultants to law departments fall far short of this kind of research (See my post of April 5, 2005 about the demise of the Association of Law Department Consultants.).

Litigation consultants work with law departments to map out case strategies, prepare courtroom exhibits, and provide forensic analysis. From a website came the following list:

Charles River Associates (Boston, MA); Decision Research (Boston, MA); Economic Analysis Corporation (Los Angeles, CA); Economists Incorporated (Washington DC); FinEcon (Los Angeles, CA); Law & Economics Consulting Group (Emeryville, CA); Lexecon (Chicago, IL); Litigation Sciences (Los Angeles, CA); Micronomics (Los Angeles, CA); National Economic Research Associates NERA (White Plains, NY); and Price Waterhouse (Los Angeles, CA and New York, NY).

There are certainly more firms in this neighborhood of the cottage industry that thrives off of law departments, but I wanted to start with a good list and invite readers to comment on other participants.

Let’s take an example and look at some tools. A law department knows the number of matters each of its law firms handled during a year. The easiest ways to describe that data include the average, median, and mode of matters per firm (See my post of Nov. 30, 2005 for definitions of those terms.). A scatter-gram and its trend line, once you sort the data, depicts another aspect of the data’s dispersion (See my post of June 6, 2006 about scatter-grams and trend lines.). Here are three more concepts regarding how to show the dispersion of such a data set: central tendency, shape and variance.

To depict central tendency, you can use the minimum, maximum, and range of matter numbers per firm. The minimum is one; the maximum could be scores of matters, and the range is the difference between those two numbers. The inter-quartile mean is a truncated mean: discard the lowest and the highest group of matter numbers (sometimes the highest and lowest quartiles or quintiles); then calculate the average of the remaining numbers.

A histogram shows the “shape” of the data, as it depicts the number of matters by the heights of columns. A histogram looks like a single-humped mountain with its peak at the mode if the distribution is reasonably normal (See my post of Oct. 24, 2005 on bell curves and the standard distribution.). You can go further and show the percentage of the total at each stage of a cumulative presentation. Skewness is a measure of the asymmetry of the distribution of data. Roughly speaking, a distribution has positive skew (right-skewed) if the higher-figure tail is longer and negative skew (left-skewed) if the lower-figure tail is longer. Kurtosis is a measure of the “peakedness” of the data’s distribution.

One of the questions asked in a survey of UK law departments was “how good is the support that you receive from the IT function in the delivery of legal services.” As presented in Law Dept. Quarterly, Vol. 2, May-July 2006 at 25, on a scale of 1 to ten, 31 percent praised IT (a score of 8, 9, or 10) and 20 percent damned IT (scores of 1, 2, or 3). About half the scores were in the middle between “extremely poor” and “extremely good,” with an overall median of 6.

Not surprising, this number of critics, since IT support is a common whipping boy of law departments (See my post of March 26, 2006 on poor support by IT.), but at the same time an unexpectedly strong showing of satisfaction. Law is a small pool of peculiar users – in the eyes of the IT group – and lawyers cushioned in law firms are too demanding when they come in-house.

I wonder if legal departments would evaluate HR support with something like this distribution of scores.

The law department of Cisco, which spends each year three percent of its total legal budget on technology, has built a suite of tools, all of which are accessible through a portal. As I conceive it, portal software sits on top of other software packages and pulls together their content (See my posts of Aug. 5, 2005 about supplements to matter management systems; Feb. 12, 2006 comparing an extranet to a portal; Aug. 5, 2005 about a portal in Sears’ law department for litigation support; and April 9, 2006 about a portal in a manufacturer’s law department.)

For example, a portal might draw on the corporate secretary’s database, a document management system, a matter management system and an IP database – all with the goal to compile a full picture of law firm usage or a client’s activities. An intranet site can serve as a passive platform; a portal compiles information.

A side bar in Law Dept. Quarterly, Vol. 2, May-July 2006 at 22 (Jon Bellis), lists nine things that can undermine the success of a technology initiative: (1) “lack of commitment by the general counsel;” (2) “inadequate participation, understanding and buy-in among users;” (3) “unclear vision and goals;” (4) “technology viewed as an end in itself, insufficiently integrated with business goals and processes;” (5) “insufficient funding and resources to implement and maintain the system,” (6) “inadequate technical support from the organization, vendor and/or other outside resources;” (7) “failure to define metrics and monitor results;” (8) “poor project planning and management;” and (9) “unrealistic view of what it takes to succeed.” No quarrel with any of these.

But, before I ran across this list, I had offered my own technology wreakers (See my post of June 21, 2006 and its 7 reasons.), and I feel some consternation that the two lists barely match. Worse, as I ruminated on these new nine, even more obstacles appeared before me. It’s a wonder law departments are not still stuck with chisels and clay tablets!

a) The general counsel and top lawyers may only be committed to others using the software, but do not themselves walk the talk. “The GC doesn’t put documents on the new document management system.”

Let me rattle off the reasons that come to mind.

New software or hardware calls for some amount of change, and lawyers – like all people – generally dislike change (See my post of May 30, 2006 on the difficulties of change.).

It is hard to calculate with conviction technology’s return on investment (See my post of July 31, 2005 on implausible ROI calculations.).