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…
I was interested how many times certain law departments show up in Google search results. When I searched “Google law department”, Google returned what it determined are the top 10 web pages for that search. At the top of the first page, in modest grey font, it said “Page 1…
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…
I am deeply invested in this topic, but I am struggling. And, this is a huge topic that deserves multiple thoughtful posts. But I will stick my toe into the water because of a piece in MIT Tech. Rev., May/June 2014 at 10. A professor of political science and computer…
A post on LDO Buzz back in April reprinted an article originally published in InsideCounsel. They article covers the usual points regarding what benchmark data to consider, what drives those metrics, and some steps to take to address problems. Nothing new, nothing objectionable. One line, however, missed a key point:…
When something increases the same fraction or percentage, rather than the same amount, during each period of time, the numerically savvy call it exponential growth. It would almost certainly be inaccurate for a general counsel to announce that outside counsel spending by her department, for example, has grown exponentially for…
Rick Klau has spent most of his professional life with Internet startups. Now with Google Ventures, Klau keynoted this year’s ABA Techshow. The ABA Journal, June 2014 at 37, summarized three lessons Klau offered for the legal industry. His first lesson “emphasized the importance of using data to make decisions.”…
When they create a graphical plot, most people unthinkingly use the default axis linest. The axis lines on the typical scatter-plot or bar plot are the rectangle of lines around the plot data – the points or columns. Outside the axis lines are the tick marks, labels, text, and legends.…
Andy Kraftsow wrote a piece for Inside Counsel (February 21, 2014). He explained the mathematics of the Poisson distribution to show in discovery how to dramatically reduce the number of documents that need to be reviewed to understand what they say about the issues. Most of the piece explains the…
An API, which is an acronym for application program interface, is software that lets programmers work with a program, such as to extract information from on online site. Many APIs are available for specific websites. For example, Amazon or eBay APIs allow developers to use their platform to create specialized…