Law Department Management Blog
Consider ten management concepts that in my opinion ought to have more currency among enlightened managers within law departments.
Concept visualization: display ideas in visual space to see their importance and relationships (See my post of May 15, 2009: idea relationship software with 6 references; and Feb. 10, 2010: visual analytics.).
Correlations: when data shows a numeric connection between two events or metrics (See my post of Feb.13, 2008: correlations with 16 references; and Sept. 28, 2010: correlations with 10 references.).
Culture: the crucial, not-questioned, air-we-breath ways of working of a law department (See my post of Nov. 20, 2007: culture with 13 references and 3 other posts cited; and Aug. 17, 2010: culture defined.).
Decision analysis: lessons learned about how professionals come to conclusions (See my post of Feb. 16, 2008: decisions with 42 references; and March 15, 2009: cognitive traps with 21 references.).
Demographics: cognitive, cultural, and psychological differences between different age groups (See my post of Dec. 5, 2010: demographics and law departments with 11 references.).
Ethnography; the ways that people in groups interact with each other and their artifacts (See my post of Dec. 16, 2005: ethnographers identify patterns in behavior; June 24, 2007 what a cultural anthropologist could glean about law departments; Jan. 8, 2008: how ethnography cold help us understand law departments; and Nov. 19, 2008: a way to understand practices in law departments.).
Hierarchy: not just the sociological notion of who outranks whom in an organization, but the broader notion of greater and lesser importance (See my post of Sept. 22, 2008: concepts and hierarchies; and Feb. 6, 2007: Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.).
Information theory: how to clarify in numbers reduction of uncertainty (See my post of May 23, 2008 #4: information theory; March 6, 2009 #1: diminishment of information with each transmission; July 17, 2009: applications of information theory; Nov. 19, 2010: mathematics underlies information theory.).
Network analysis: how to quantify and depict the relationships between people in a law department and with those outside it (See my post of May 11, 2010: social network analysis with 6 references.).
Sustainability: a term for broad environmental awareness (See my post of April 18, 2009: EMC’s general counsel oversees “sustainability”.).