LDO Buzz

Jason Emanis
While attending the session, “Metrics and Dashboards-Examples of Useful Report Formats”, at LegalTech West Coast’s LDO Track, I grabbed a few nuggets for the law department operations folks. Like the top metrics Amgen’s law department measures:

1. Annual Spend
2. Spend by Practice Area
3. Top 10 Law Firms
4. Top Law Firms by Practice Areas
5. Top 10 Matters
6. Top Matters by Practice Area

Metrics plus further thoughts on the substitution of an in-house lawyer for outside counsel
Rees Morrison, Law Department Management
A column by Richard Stock for the Canadian Corporate Counsel Association’s quarterly, Leading Corporate Counsel, Fall 2010, provides a rule-of-thumb for when to consider in-sourcing legal work. Stock writes that “a minimum of 600 external hours must be in-sourced to cost justify a new position in the legal department.” (read the post)

How to leverage “Big Data” to better manage the business of law
Using large data sets to identify trends, predict risk and improve performance
Richard Flynn, InsideCounsel
“Big Data” is a term that is capturing a lot of attention. Almost every industry is involved with some type of transaction that leads to mass amounts of data. These large data sets are often referred to as Big Data because they are difficult to optimize: How do you capture, store or analyze the information in a meaningful way? (read the article)

Canned reports, dashboards, and data analytics – different levels of insight
Rees Morrison, Law Department Management
Data analysis goes further than reports and dashboards. It strives to correlate more than two metrics with each other. An example might be the size of law firms and their effective billing rates. Another might link numbers of timekeepers to monthly burn rates or settlements paid to external fees. (read the post)

Law Departments Leverage Analytics
Keith Okano, ExecutiveCounsel Magazine
The metrics gleaned from analyzing data can help the law department emerge as a strategic partner in the business. Outside counsel fees represent a significant portion of overall spending in many departments, and e-billing solutions can provide the insight necessary to control those costs. However, to optimize performance, gain greater efficiency and make more informed decisions, legal departments need to analyze all costs, internal and external. (read the article)

Must-Have Performance Metrics For Law Departments
Rebecca Thorkildsen, Law360
Creating a meaningful performance measurement program is one of the biggest challenges for law department managers. It is relatively easy to identify a basic set of measures that would apply to most law departments. For example, most track department-level expenditures against annual budgets. Similarly, most law departments use outside legal service providers, and they typically monitor aggregate costs and run basic reports such as “Top 10 Most Expensive Matters” or “Outside Spend by Legal Service Provider.” Tracking this information over time is useful and necessary. (read the post)

Guest article: Meeting the Value Challenge – or How to Manage Legal Services and Deliver Business Value
David Samia, Legal Technology Insider
Legal departments are indispensable to today’s organizations; yet, they have traditionally been viewed as cost centers that are necessary to minimize business risk rather than a strategic asset that is aligned with achieving an organization’s business goals. Today’s Law departments must do far more than simply protect the business; they must help proactively grow it. (read the post)

Homemade Dashboard and Chips, Anyone?
Lisa Girmscheid, Legal Project Manager, Rockwell Automation, Inc.
Let’s face it – we don’t go to the trouble of implementing an e-billing and matter management system just so we can eliminate paper bills. Dashboards, metrics, KPIs – they are the Holy Grail of our existence. Dashboards are powerful tools that can help plan, monitor, measure and report how the law department manages things like appropriate staffing ratios, trends, outside law firm performance, budgets, matters and costs.
If someone asked me to describe the concept of a dashboard, I would compare it to something tangible, like salsa made fresh from your garden. (The Dashboard/Ginsu comparison led me to this idea, so bear with me, I promise this will eventually make sense.) (read the post)

LegalTech Takeaways: Cost-Saving Tips, Government E-Discovery
Evan Koblentz, Law Technology News
(Don’t let the title fool you, this article has very little to do with e-Discovery and more to do with data mining. It is a good read. – Jason Emanis)

“My whole schtick when I got into the law department was, ‘You guys don’t even know how much you spend or where you spend it’,” began Karen Dunning, senior director of legal operations at Motorola Solutions. But, she reflected, “How do you let the general counsel really understand in a single picture, in 4 to 5 minutes, how and where they’re spending money?” (read the article)

Morrison on Metrics: Grouped thoughts on scattergrams
The finer points of plotting graphs and lines
Rees Morrison, InsideCounsel
When you create a scattergram, the most common additional step of analysis and visualization is to superimpose on it a trend-line. If you use the default trend-line function of Excel, the line will be straight (known as the least squares line), and it will generate an equation for the line. A straight line, however, may convey a distorted sense of the trend of the points on a scattergram that has some unusually high or low numbers or anomalies in the middle of fairly consistent numbers. (read the post)