Legal departments often lag behind other company units when it comes to operating in a business-forward fashion, particularly with how they track data about key functions they perform.
To help in-house legal teams catch up with other departments, a group of legal operations professionals and consultants across the globe recently launched the Legal Metrics Portal.
The free online resource provides a catalog of more than 500 metrics of interest to legal departments and a self-guided wizard that provides recommendations for metrics relevant to a legal team’s specific needs.
The experts involved with the project come from NetApp, LegalOps.com, Elevate, PWC Australia’s NewLaw and Is Inspired.
“When you're running legal like a business, that involves metrics, numbers and processes,” says Connie Brenton, vice president of law, technology and operations at NetApp. “You can’t become more efficient without metrics and numbers.”
A catalog of metrics
The portal’s metrics catalog comes replete with descriptions of data spanning 13 legal operations and four legal practice areas. These areas include compliance, financial management, records management and technology.
The portal describes the level of importance of the metrics. It also shares how easy or difficult the data would be to obtain and suggests a potential method of collection.
“It's important to understand, especially for beginners, whether they're choosing the hardest path possible or whether they're choosing the most direct path to at least getting started,” says Ron Dappen, principal of Dappen Group, who is providing marketing support for the portal.
Jeff Franke, CEO of LegalOps.com, says most legal teams will likely start by focusing on collecting data related to finances. The portal can assist teams with identifying which financial metrics are most pertinent to their department, such as internal legal spend as percent of revenue or average spend per matter by type.
In some instances, companies with compliance issues may instead choose to emphasize compliance-related metrics.
Decisions about which metrics to track should inform the development of an overarching metrics program, according to Franke, and the portal aids with the development of such programs.
“Almost everything you do should flow from a strategic plan, and metrics are something that support that,” he says.
Storytelling to demonstrate value
In-house professionals can also use the portal’s wizard to figure out how to use metrics to tell key narratives about their legal departments.
Mick Sheehy, who directs PwC Australia’s NewLaw team, says these stories can help legal teams prove they are more than just cost centers.
“If you want to tell a story about the value of the legal department in the way it manages contracts or the way in which it is using technology, you can use that wizard to drill down to the metrics that are going to support that story,” Sheehy says.
Dappen says contracts are likely to be a common area in which key stories can be told.
“If you can measure the fact that the legal department has improved turnaround time on non-disclosure agreements from several days to one day, that actually impacts the organization’s speed to cash,” he says. “That's a metric that will get your CFO’s attention in a heartbeat.”
J. Deckert, VP of operations at Is Inspired, said legal departments can also use the portal to help them answer metrics-related questions they have.
After drilling down from more general to more specific questions, the portal provides a curated list of metrics related to the questions asked.
The answers provided can offer important guidance to legal departments that are seeking to create metrics programs or make important decisions, according to the portal’s creators.
Benchmarks
Roughly 500 people from across the globe have signed up and used the portal site so far, Franke says.
He and other participants involved with the portal’s creation emphasize that they hope to further develop it in the months and years to come. This includes seeking suggestions about metrics to add and additional narratives to include, with the portal featuring a “contribute content” page for those wanting to submit recommendations.
“This is a contribution to the industry that we expect to grow with the addition of other collaborators,” says Brenton, the founder of the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC).
Franke, who also previously held leadership roles at CLOC, shares that the portal may in the future seek to collect data from users about the different metrics.
This information could be made anonymous and analyzed to provide users with benchmarks for similarly sized legal departments.
“The portal is a first step towards finding some industry metrics that we can all agree on against which benchmarks can be created,” Franke says.
