In-House Counsel

A method to describe management initiatives on double axes

By Rees Morrison

We can describe management initiatives in law departments by various attributes, picking two at a time, and depict the intersection as a scatter-gram. Take mentoring programs. Two ways to describe a program would be duration and investment. In one law department the mentoring program has been underway for 36 months and costs less than $500 per attorney per year. Another department, just starting out with formal mentoring, is 6 months into it and spends $1,000 per attorney per year. An X-Y chart locates them as two different points.

Another pair of descriptive metrics might be ?hours spent per lawyer per month? versus ?number of participants as a percentage of all lawyers.? One department?s mentoring program might result in its lawyers devoting a half hour a month and 40 percent of the lawyers take part. Another department might average less than a quarter hour monthly but have a 60 percent participation rate. Again, someone could plot such a pair of attributes on a chart. Other metrics are possible and the permutations of depicting them on a scatter-gram are multiple.

The resulting scatter-grams will disclose patterns as well as benchmark metrics (See my post of Jan. 14, 2007: log-log scales; June 6, 2006: scatter-plots let you see patterns; and March 11, 2009: correlations of attributes of initiatives.).

Full post as published by Law Department Management on March 11, 2009 (boomark / email).