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 scatterplots have so many data points close to each other that you can’t distinguish much from the cloudy mass where they cluster. That problem is known to data scientists as over-plotting. An example would be a plot that shows for a large law department the amounts of incoming invoices…
If we had more data on the sizes of law firms retained by U.S. law departments, the industry would have some guidelines for typical distributions. For example, it might be a rule of thumb that roughly one-third of the law firms retained by a typical U.S. law department would be…
A Palo Alto startup, Ayasdi, builds software that uses the branch of mathematics known as topology. Topology concerns how shapes interact with space, and has application to portraying large collections of data. As described in Bloomberg BusinessWeek, January 28, 2013 at 34, Avasdi’s software can take huge amounts of data…
In the sciences, a recent movement is often referred to as “reproducible research.” What it espouses is a philosophy of transparency regarding data and analysis – share the data you collected, what you did to it, and how you did calculations and graphics. Those who conduct surveys, for example, should…
Mostly for lack of a better way to classify companies, benchmark surveys ask respondents to choose from a list of “industries.” We see those lists all the time: manufacturing, technology, pharmaceutical, and so on. In the messy real world, we all realize, companies are not so neatly boxed and defined. …
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. …
It is a mistake to think that your data has to be complete and clean for you to push ahead with analytics. You will leave on the table significant savings and insights that could be realized even from imperfect and provisional models or conclusions based on partial or not-fully-scrubbed data. …
Let’s assume that in the coming years general counsel who give a thought to law department benchmarks can readily find some of those basic metrics. If they can find them without submitting their own department’s data, they may decide not to submit if they know they compare unfavorably. If they…
A network graph, when the term is used by mathematicians, means a structure comprised of nodes and edges. For example, a law department could represent the law firms it retained during the previous year by means of such a graph. The department would be the central node on the graph…