The world is rushing to embrace statistics. Not so lawyers.
For Today’s Graduate, Just One Word: Statistics (New York Times, 6 August 2009) explains the rise of statisticians. “In field after field, computing and the Web are creating new realms of data to explore — sensor signals, surveillance tapes, social network chatter, public records and more… Though at the fore, statisticians are only a small part of an army of experts using modern statistical techniques for data analysis.”
It’s not that lawyer and law firm managers have no data to analyze. I’ve frequently lamented the lack of statistics in e-discovery, a very good example of ‘new realms of data to explore’ . And whatever happened to business intelligence (BI) in law firm management. The last entry in my BI blog category was three years ago. Maybe firms and vendors stopped talking about BI, but I suspect it just never got the traction I expected.
I’d be curious to know the average number of semesters of college-level math studied by lawyers versus other professionals. I suspect therein lies the explanation.