Indices of all kinds of aspects of law department operations

I have been thinking about indices, by which term I mean collections of metrics that combine to form a single measure. Everyone knows the Consumer Price Index: the aggregated and weighted prices of a basket of common goods and services (See my post of Sept. 10, 2005: indices generally; Nov. 22, 2006: two meanings of index: a combination of factors or a normalizing technique; and Jan. 11, 2011: synthetic and natural indices as benchmark tool.). This blog is littered with posts about various indices other than references to the CPI, so I collected them.

Several concern talent in legal departments (See my post of April 3, 2005: energy and engagement of employees; April 16, 2007: talent; April 16, 2009: Corporate Equality Index; and Oct. 19, 2009: collegiality and camaraderie in a legal department.).

Others discuss indices related to what in-house lawyers practice (See my post of Aug. 14, 2005: trademarks; Sept. 10, 2005: overall law department performance; Aug. 27, 2005: complexity; May 16, 2007: changes in practice areas; June 25, 2007: contract complexity; and Feb. 2, 2010: prose readability.).

A third category of posts mentions outside counsel (See my post of May 17, 2006: index the risk of lawsuits; Aug. 20, 2006: value-based payments to a firm from a performance index; Oct. 25, 2006: litigation portfolios; Oct. 29, 2009: distribution of a department’s spend on external counsel; and July 28, 2010: BigMac index of currencies.).

Some posts introduce mathematical measures for indexes or address other uses (See my post of Aug. 28, 2005: index and gap analysis for client satisfaction; May 28, 2009: the h-index and a potential application to legal departments’ retention of law firms; April 26, 2010: show how similar one legal department is to another on key dimensions; Aug. 5, 2010: Herfindahl’s index of industry complexity; Sept. 22, 2010: entropy index of diversification; Nov. 30, 2010: ranking countries on an index of benchmarks; Dec. 1, 2010: industry ranking of legal intensity; and Jan. 30, 2011: heterogeneity index.).