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An ailing metric: sick days per lawyer per year

It hurt to realize that all is not well with one metric: median sick days taken per year by in-house lawyers. We know from the Fin. Times, July 18, 2006 at 6 that “on average, managers in the UK take just 3.19 days off a year due to sickness — about half the rate recorded by other staff.” That precision means the finding is not doctored. We do not know the comparable figure for the workaholic in-house counsel of the world.

I have a malingering fear that the absent metric will not get well. I can’t put to bed the worry that the ward of law department management may never recover from this lack of an operating benchmark.