Knowledge of statistics is 94.3% important for in-house counsel

Greg Listokin’s post on Prawfs Blawg, May 22, 2006, proposes to make a statistics course mandatory for law students notes that “there are entire fields of law that are nearly impossible to fully grasp without a basic knowledge of statistics. To name a few, I would put employment discrimination, products liability, and much of torts and evidence in this category. In addition, statistical evidence or thinking plays (or at least should play) some role in almost every area of law.” One can also add M&A work where anti-trust analyses enter in and any spending analysis.

To the same point, corporate practitioners should understand the powers and limitations of statistics (See my post of Dec. 26, 2005 on one form of statistical analysis, Bayesian.). If you don’t have a facility with the ways to describe the dispersion of data (average, median), data’s central tendencies (mode, standard deviation), and correlation (least squares equation), your innumeracy will limit you.