All Articles
Email by the Numbers: Graphing a department’s email activity can yield crucial information on productivity and value
General counsel want to know about the legal department’s productivity, value and client engagement. Even better, they welcome ideas regarding how to improve those important attributes. The good news is that insightful clues to each of them are as close as the email inbox! General counsel who...
Read MoreJust Say No to No: Be able to counter any objections to using data analytics in management decisions
Articles, consultants and conferences repeatedly praise data as an antidote to misimpressions and a supplement to experience. Most general counsel agree and, in their own fashion, rely on the data their department generates. Why, however, do some law department managers oppose investments in...
Read MoreTech and Telecomm Benchmarks with a PCP
This article introduces a type of graph that shows multiple metrics of law departments on the same scale – probably a new graph for most readers – a parallel coordinate plot (PCP). We will explain the PCP1 using data from the General Counsel Metrics LLC benchmarking survey sponsored by...
Read MoreUsing Stats to Predict Outside Legal Spending
This article explains how you can predict the amount a company’s law department spends on outside counsel based on the revenue of the company. Such a prediction can be useful for law firms, for example, when estimating how much of a given company’s expenditures the firm receives (the so...
Read MoreLegal Operations
In All Things, Moderation – Including Outside Firms: For an in-house lawyer to get to know and work well with a handful of firms seems entirely reasonable based on the data
For decades, general counsel of U.S. companies have strived for the right number of external law firms to retain. Very broadly, three camps have emerged: the Convergers argue for a small number of law firms to handle most of the matters and receive most of the company’s spend; the Coursers...
Read MoreLegal Operations
No Dumping: Data should be shaped for lawyers, not shoveled at them
Data, for managers of lawyers, is only as good as someone can grasp it and learn from it. A graphic plot is not the only choice. When you present data to lawyers, you can choose among five primary modes: text, lists, tables, charts or infographics. The message of this article is not at all that...
Read MoreLegal Operations
Should Law Departments Rely on Survey Findings? GCs should consider whether differences are statistically meaningful
Surveys often make much of comparisons, such as the average number of lawyers for every billion dollars of revenue between various industries, but when are those differences meaningful? If the average for retail is 3 lawyers per billion and the average for consumer products is 3.5, is it...
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