by James S. Wilber, Esq., Altman Weil, Inc. As companies continue to pay careful attention to controlling costs, law departments remain under scrutiny. Accordingly, in-house lawyers regularly look for ways to demonstrate value to their clients. One of the easiest and most cost effective ways of doing this is…
Having completed a client satisfaction survey, you can sort your participants all kinds of ways. Let’s give an example by sorting the participants by level and then also identifying them by their office location. Assume that all we do is code them by US office or international office. The plot…
by James S. Wilber, Esq., Altman Weil, Inc. Most law departments periodically use written or online surveys to gauge the satisfaction of clients with the services they (and outside counsel) provide. A question that often arises is whether (and if so, how) to protect the confidentiality of the responses…
When you survey your clients to assess how satisfied they are with your law department, you want confidence that you have tapped a representative group by their levels. One way to visualize the responses you get from your survey by a distribution of levels is shown below. For this example,…
by James S. Wilber, Altman Weil, Inc. Law departments that appreciate the value of client satisfaction understand the importance of obtaining systematic feedback from their clients. The methodological choice typically is between a written or online survey, on the one hand, or in-person meetings and interviews of clients on the…
Let’s look at the Fortune 500 companies broken into equal-sized revenue categories and see if there is any pattern about the law school of their top lawyers. The plot below shows 20 revenue categories increasing from $4.8 billion for the smallest company on the left to $89 billion and up…
A Shepard’s diagram typically describes the composition of soil in terms of three materials: clay, silt, and sand. The pyramid labels each portion according to the respective proportions of those materials in a particular clump of soil. Naturally, seeing such a diagram led me to think about law departments. My…
Setting aside the number of students in each class of the ranked law schools, is there any pattern in the number of graduates who are Fortune 500 general counsel according to the law school’s rank? The plot above shows the number of graduates by the height of the blue dots…
My hypothesis was that the larger the law school, in terms of students enrolled, the more graduates it would have who are the general counsel of a Fortune 500 company. To keep the data tractable and the plot below legible, I took the 150 top-ranked schools from US News &…
An article in the Harvard Business Review, June 2014, at 67, by Clayton Christensen and another author, includes a sidebar that criticizes overuse of spreadsheets. When strategic decisions are based on spreadsheet analysis, the authors believe managers are often misguided. Without a doubt, spreadsheets can mislead or can create a…