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 consequence of convergence, not just unhappy lawyers but also disgruntled clients (June 6, 2011)

Internal clients of the law department feel pain when legal departments sharply reduce the number of firms used.

A proposal by a group of large law firms to give law departments of “sophisticated clients” more regulatory freedom (June 9, 2011)

Companies with in-house lawyers are sophisticated enough to retain non-lawyers for legal services.

More observations on value demonstrated by law departments, from survey results (June 10, 2011)

A survey found that at least half of the law departments responding say they demonstrate value to their companies by “implementing knowledge management systems.” That finding troubles me, for three reasons.

For a group of insurance companies, litigation in the past 12 months dropped or held steady (June 15, 2011)

A recent report, based on data mostly from large U.S. insurance companies, found that 40 percent of them reported a smaller inventory of litigation in the 12 months preceding October 2010.

Group wisdom and conclusions derived through the Delphi technique (June 16, 2011)

Three key aspects of a decision-making method known as the Delphi technique.

Decision aids that vary from the traditional Franklin T (June 19, 2011)

Beyond Ben Franklin’s T, some variations on it.

Should you expect your law firms to scrub their invoices electronically to match your guidelines? (June 23, 2011)

Part of me admires this step, part of me has a more cynical worry.

Survey finds that required use of UTBMS code makes only a modest difference in firm billing behavior (June 27, 2011)

A survey by Legalbill found that four out of ten of the lawyer respondents said that the code requirement changed their billing to a moderate or large degree; the remainder said that it made no difference or only a small difference.