Rees Morrison’s Morsels #124 – posts longa, morsels breva

General counsel compete with their peer executives in a company. Humans being what they are, proud and possessive, it follows that general counsel compete at least some of the time with their peer executives. Notwithstanding the internal exchange of legal services for technical, personnel, financial, and physical support from other staff groups, each functional head elbows and crowds for budgetary funds, recognition from the CEO, additions of responsibility, headcount, respect and other prerogatives. The fates of some legal departments hang in the balance.

Varieties of correlation tests. A common type of correlation, known as the Pearson Product Moment Correlation, is appropriate when both variables are measured at an interval level. A wide variety of other types of correlations apply in other circumstances. For instance, with two ordinal variables, the Spearman rank Order Correlation (rho) or the Kendall rank order Correlation (tau) are appropriate. When one measure is a continuous interval level and the other is dichotomous (i.e., two-categories like yes or no) you can use the Point-Biserial Correlation. For other situations, consulting the web-based statistics selection program, Selecting Statistics (See my post of Oct. 29, 2009: how to determine the statistical significance of a correlation.).

Concordance analysis of my nearly 5,000 headers. The first 4,937 headers I wrote for posts on this blog reveal a sensible distribution of frequent words. The ten most commonly used are ”law” (1,569), “departments” (640), “counsel” (584), “department” (573), “firms” (509), “legal” (500), “lawyers” (401), “management” (342), “general” (302), and “in-house” (292). My software, Concordance, says the collection of headers includes 7,352 words (32,347 tokens). Word tells me the file has 50,564 words in it.

Enterprise risk management software at Computer Sciences Corporation. OpenPages is the software CSC uses for enterprise risk management. How would a legal department use such software (See my post of Aug. 17, 2009: controlling legal risks with 13 references and 2 metaposts.).

Posts read from an iPhone! When you see iconfactory.com/twitterrific as the referral source from a visitor, you know that the person was using Mobile Safari on a small screen. That was a first! On October 3rd I noticed the referring site. Amazing that someone read a post of mine on their iPhone.