Category: General

Last month, in As World Embraces Statistics, Lawyers Sit on Sideline, I lamented the lack of statistical mindset in the legal market. Why should we care?  One reason: statistics can be very important at trial. Bob Ambrogi, in Statistics Surge as Evidence in Trials (IMS...

The legal market is remarkable for its lack of solid market research. There is much discussion about alternate fee arrangements (AFA), for example, but little data about how extensive the market is. I’m going to take a flyer and estimate total AFA from one data...

Lawyers have discussed alternative fee arrangements (AFA) since at least 1989, when I first became a law firm manager. The economic crisis adds fuel to the supposed AFA fire. Now, a new article by two prominent lawyers argues the merits of fixed fees, pointing out...

I have previously compared the health and legal professions, focusing on the evidenced-based approach in medicine and the appalling lack of anything like it in legal. Informed by the current national health care debate, I see another lesson for lawyers and law firm managers: find...

Dan Regard’s post The Fragmentation of the Communication Container at EDD Update blog raises important practical EDD considerations. Plus it suggests what metaphysical question about meaning.  Dan writes that “methods of communication have changed over the last few years”. At one time he expected that...

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 —...

Is the legal profession unusual in its reliance on untested assumptions?  I frequently point out that lawyers implicitly assume the human document review in e-discovery is reliable so I won’t beat that already dead horse. Corporate Counsel Are Reducing Ranks of Secondary Outside Firms, Survey...

In my Fall 2003 article, A Marketplace Trial, published in the litigation supplement to the American Lawyer, I argued that one could apply financial techniques to value and hedge lawsuits. The market may have taken a big step in that direction.  Investing in Lawsuits, for...