In-House Counsel

A concordance analysis of of the first 3,700 headers on LawDepartmentManagementblog

By Rees Morrison

Using a program called Concordance, I analyzed the headers of my first 3,700 posts, all 23,607 ?tokens? ? which includes entries such as ?#45? ? resulting from 6,064 different words (?types?). Linguists will note immediately the type/token ratio of 3.893.

But let?s get to the exciting revelations. Here are the 22 substantive words used most commonly. Law (1,248 times used), departments and department (476, 422, respectively), counsel (438), firms and firm (375,161), legal (307), lawyers (296), management (237), general (217), in-house (214), outside (152), litigation (145), costs and cost (131, 75), corporate (79), software (74), services (70), clients and client (69, 67), rates (67), inside (65), business (64), billing (63) and spending (62).

The manifest themes of this blog, based on the words used most frequently in its headers, are law/legal departments, general counsel, law firms, finances, and corporate clients.

Appearing only once are such recondite words as amygdale, anthropomorphize, antiquarian, arteriosclerosis, autarky, barnstorming, bruited, cluelessness, Croesus, and crowd-hacking. And, since you ask, 3,639 of the 6,064 words appear only one time! Another 911 words appear only twice in all the headers and 396 appear three times.

To conclude these verbal pyrotechniques, did you know that the collocation feature shows that to the left of ?counsel? are 190 instances of ?general? ? so ?general counsel,? 108 ?outside,? 69 ?in-house,? and 16 ?corporate?? As for ?department,? to the left most commonly is ?law? (355 ? thus ?law department?), ?legal? (25 times) and to the right of ?department? is most commonly the word ?management? (53 times).

Full post as published by Law Department Management on November 22, 2008 (boomark / email).