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Showing posts from May, 2012

Lies, damn lies and ... metrics

The word “metrics” is so commonly used in modern business life that nobody thinks they need a definition of the term. It hardly occurred to me to look it up before starting this blog. But we probably ought to, because there's a fair bit of groupthink on this topic. If you open the Oxford English Dictionary, once you’ve made it past the definition of the “ metric system ”, which remains a surprisingly lively political topic, you'll find “ metrics (in business) ” defined as: “ a set of figures or statistics that measure results ”. That’s short, but it will probably do. After discussing metrics with a large number of senior legal colleagues over the past year, I’ve concluded that metrics are widely distrusted by the legal profession. The topic certainly polarizes opinions. The most common charge made against metrics is that they provide a reductivist view of an activity which involves complex interactions that aren’t really capable of or susceptible to numerical measurement