Moneyball For Lawyers: Should ‘Relative Performance Measure’ Replace Billed Hours In Determining Attorney Productivity?

ABA Journal, New Metric Inspired by Baseball Stats Aims to Measure Real Value of Lawyers' Work:

The Thomson Reuters Institute is introducing a new metric that measures how well lawyers are generating fees and collecting them by comparing them to their peers.

The “relative performance measure,” abbreviated as RPM, can be used to measure a lawyer’s performance compared to other lawyers in the same segment, practice group, office location or lawyer title, according to an Aug. 14 press release.

American Lawyer, With Hours Tenuous, New Metric Looks to Baseball to Assess Lawyer Productivity:

Researchers assert the new metric is more strongly correlated to profitability.

Similar to professional baseball, where players’ production is often gauged by their performance relative to a standard “replacement-level” player at their position, the RPM uses timekeeper-level data on hours worked, rates charged, fees generated and collection speeds to compute a “replacement-level” score among categories of lawyers to calculate the over- or under-performance of timekeepers in those areas.

In fact, baseball helped inspire the idea, said Marcus Belanger, an analyst with the Thomson Reuters Institute who authored the report.

“We thought: ‘What is the equivalent of that for lawyers? What could we do to level the playing field?’ Because [hours] is a fundamentally flawed metric, susceptible to macroeconomic factors and other things outside of an attorney’s control,” he said in an interview this week. ...

Drilling down into productivity makes sense not only because hours (and the related metric that TR uses, average daily demand per full-time equivalent) have become more “detached” from law firm profitability over the years, they are expected to become even less illustrative as generative AI becomes more widespread.

For Moneyball for law professors, see:

• Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine) & Rafael Gely (Missouri), What Law Schools Can Learn from Billy Beane and the Oakland Athletics, 82 Texas L. Rev. 1483 (2004)
• Mark Fenster (Florida), The Faculty Salary Game (2005)
• Dave Hoffman (Penn), Law Faculty Hiring: Pedigree or Performance? (2005)
• Joseph Liu (Boston College), Law Prof Fantasy League (2005)
• Jim Chen (Michigan State), The First Moneyball Law School? (2005)
• Bill Henderson (Indiana), Lessons from the U.S. News Rankings: Are Law Schools Overinvesting in Scholarship? (2006)
• Bill Henderson (Indiana), Moneyball and Faculty Hiring (2006)
• National Review, Moneyball And George Mason Law School (2006)
• Wall Street Journal, Ranking Law Professors and Heart Surgeons (2006)
• Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Moneyball Redux: The Tax Prof Exchange (2007)
• Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine) & Bill Henderson (Indiana), Advice for Erwin Chemerinsky (2007)
• Bill Henderson (Indiana), Applying Moneyball Principles to Law Schools (2007)
• Bill Henderson (Indiana), Erwin Chemerinsky as Billy Beane? (2007)
• Bill Henderson (Indiana), A Moneyball Guide to Law Schools (2007)
• Clayton Gillette (NYU), Law School Faculty as Free Agents (2008)
• Bill Henderson (Indiana), Law Professor Free Agency and "School-Specific" Capital (2008)
• Jim Chen (Michigan State), Who Is the Shane Battier of Your Faculty? (2009)
• Bridget Crawford (Pace), Moneyball, Volleyball, and Faculty Productivity (2009)
• Daniel Hamermesh (Texas), Paging Billy Beane: Scholarly Productivity Lowers Reputation But Raises Salary (2009)
• Michael Livingston (Rutgers), Rahm Emanuel and the Future of Law Schools (2009)
• Ilya Somin (George Mason), Can Moneyball Strategies Still Work for Law Schools? (2009)
• Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Moneyball, Law Practice, Higher Education, Law Libraries, and SNL (2011)
• Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), The Law School Crisis: What Would Jimmy McMillan Do? (2012)
• Jim Chen (Michigan State), Application of Moneyball Principles in Faculty Hiring (2012)
• Inside High Ed, MIT Profs Push Moneyball Approach For Faculty Hiring And Tenure Decisions (2016)
• Forbes, Harvard Law School, The GRE, And Moneyball (2017)

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