« Assigning lawyers to specific areas of expertise | Main | Experience sampling in a law department – insights into productivity, etc. »
Tools used by law departments to measure law firm performance
In mid-2005, Bottomline Technologies surveyed the Fortune 1000 companies and AM Best 200 insurers. Of the 1,892 individuals sent e-mail surveys, close to 200 responded. Bottomline’s Thomas Gaillard reported some of the results at ACC’s 2005 Annual Meeting.
Given five tools for measuring law firm performance, the respondents indicated the following percentages: “Financial analysis” (64%), “anecdotal (55%), “staff survey” (43%), “interviews” (34%) and “audit” (34%).
Let’s consider each of these. The most common choice could simply mean that the law departments keep track of their spending on each law firm. So what? The informality of chatting around the water cooler about different firms leaves huge amounts to be desired. I am very surprised at the indicated prevalence of surveys to measure law firm performance. No department I have consulted to has done such a survey. “Interviews” might mean that someone in a law department calls up others who have worked with a firm and asks them to appraise the firm; that’s only a tic better than anecdotal, and again I doubt the level of frequency indicated. Who knows what “audit” means. In short, an unsatisfactory set of metricoids (numeric factoids).
For more on evaluations of law firms (meta-post), see my posts in 2005 of April 14 on difficulties when law departments evaluate their law firms, May 28 on a spending matrix, July 16 on criticisms of law firms July 21, on data mining and evaluations, Aug. 5, on some questionable savings claims; Aug. 31 on the Royal Bank of Canada’s process, Sept. 10, on evaluations of firms by clients, Oct. 17 on rankings compared to ratings, and Nov. 1 on data that “18% formally evaluate firms”.)
Posted on November 16, 2005 at 08:03 PM in Outside Counsel | Permalink
TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry:
https://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d834519fb069e200d8352218c353ef
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Tools used by law departments to measure law firm performance:
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.
The comments to this entry are closed.