A precept of reproducible research, such as survey results that allow readers to understand the methodology and credibility of the findings, is to make generous use of “N = some number”. That conventional shorthand for “how many are we talking about” shows up in almost every reproducible-research graphic. Whether in…
If you want to plot cities on a map, for example to show locations of law schools on a map of the United States, you need to have the longitude and latitude of each school’s city. The brute force way to get those geographic intersections of longitude and latitude, which…
Continuing the analysis of Fortune 500 chief legal officers, let’s test a hypothesis: the better the law school, the more of its graduates lead one of these illustrious legal departments. To have data regarding which schools are better, I incorporated the rankings of about 150 law schools in 2013 by…
Sometimes you want to compare companies on metrics that vary widely. As an example, patent applications granted during a year for a group of companies may vary from five to fifty. The external legal spend of those same companies may vary from $750,000 to $6 million. You can rank each…
In full-page ads, Bottomline Technologies proclaims that “Bottomline is chosen 3X more than any other legal spend management vendor.” Being inquisitive about law department metrics, I visited the web page the ad says lets you “Find out why” – www.bottomline.com/3x. Don’t get your hopes up. The page suggests that more…
After preparing the Four-Year Report, which starts with data on 3,846 law departments, for this blog post we took a look at one particular metric: total legal spend as a percentage of revenue (TLS). To keep the companies in this mini-analysis somewhat more comparable, we narrowed that group to US…
A calculation called “entropy” can tell us how concentrated the companies are in an industry. Concentration means how large the share is of revenue for the largest company in the industry, that company and the next larges, the two largest and the third, and so on. Specifically, entropy is measured…
Some benchmark surveys ask for spending data in U.S. dollars and leave it to the participants to convert their non-dollar spending however they choose to do so. Other surveys, including GC Metrics, accepts data in whatever currency the participant uses and then has to decide on a conversion rate. …
The hardest data to extract from a law department is data that requires someone senior to do anything. Try getting the general counsel to evaluate 25 law firms. The next hardest data to obtain is that which someone collects for one purpose, but the data analyst recognizes as a source…
You have a report that gives for each industry the median number of litigation cases per law department in the industry. Let’s say 45 cases. A later table in the report gives medians for subsets of that total number, such as medians of employment cases (perhaps 12), of patent cases…