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Legal Operations
The Core of Correlation
Managers of law departments (and of law firms) often believe that there is an identifiable connection between one set of numbers and another. Perhaps they sense that the size of the plaintiff’s law firm has some bearing on the cost of defending a lawsuit; they feel the number of patents...
Read MoreCorporate Counsel
Surveying the Surveys: There are many in the legal world, and the quality is uneven
Based on my research, during the past five years at least 90 different U.S. organizations published reports based on 190 surveys of U.S. law firms or law departments. That plethora of legal-industry surveys addressed a wide swath of management data. An analysis of the topics finds that compensation...
Read MoreA Manifesto for Metrics: Law departments need to prod their outside counsel to use data more effectively
Your business is awash in numbers, along with software tools you can use to learn from them. You also have an important cadre of allies: Your key law firms have for years been stockpiling operational numbers about your work that will help you increase and demonstrate your department’s value...
Read MoreData Should Drive Decisions: It can help counter conscious or unconscious bias
Day after day, managers confront operational problems, think about them and make choices about what to do or not to do. In other words, they decide something. But they don’t always take into account the data available to them when they make those decisions. For law departments and law...
Read More10 Tips to Make RFPs Transparent, Objective and Effective: Giving law firms what they want helps get you what you need
Keeping abreast of the latest techniques in the competitive bid process empowers general counsel to improve that process. Based on my recent consulting projects in which law departments put out requests for fixed-fee bids on large portfolios of work to be done over two or three years, 10...
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A Metrics Conundrum: What Would Janus Do?: Lawyers are sometimes torn when considering how much to rely on data
The Roman god Janus looked both ways at once. That’s an apt metaphor for the divergence in how lawyers look at the use of data in management decisions. Some lawyers look askance at data being used to augment decisions; others look with favor on it. The more clearly that lawyers understand the...
Read MoreTechnology
Making the Machine-Learning Switch: The relative advantages for firms versus law departments
You can be confident that over the next few years both law firms and law departments will increasingly include in their decisions the various results from machine-learning software. Machine-learning software takes in data and applies sophisticated algorithms to produce numerical predictions...
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