In-house legal department metrics
How can metrics be used to understand and expand your impact, and support decisions?
Most business functions, including other internal corporate support services, have a long track record of using numbers to report past performance, predict future needs, justify the capital expenditure, report risk and so on.
So why haven’t legal departments been having the same conversations?
You’ll find some great material below about legal department metrics generally:
- Podcast about legal department metrics with PwC:
https://apple.co/35UROtL
https://spoti.fi/2M3qsdO - Video about LawVu’s work with PwC around data and analytics in the legal department: https://vimeo.com/353455464
The what, when and how of legal department metrics.
Every day, legal departments make decisions. Decisions are made about resourcing, spending legal budget, training staff, engaging with clients, planning for risk events and so on. Many of these decisions are made based on judgement, experience, intuition or qualitative information. Often the basis for this type of decision making is essentially ‘gut feel’.
Applying metrics to analyse options reduces the uncertainty about decisions ordinarily made through gut feel. And so, we contend that all of these decisions will be made better with quantitative information.
- To understand what metrics you should be tracking and what decisions they’ll help drive, read this blog “The top 10 metrics your legal team should be tracking and why” and this blog "Why do Insights Matter to In-house Legal Departments?"
- Or download this whitepaper by PwC.
A dashboard is personal to your legal department.
Metrics for the sake of metrics are a waste of time.
They must support a decision.
To support a decision, metrics must be presented in a compelling and user-friendly way.
And that is why we use dashboards.
To understand how to start gathering metrics and surfacing them in a meaningful way, watch this webinar about data-driven legal operations strategies.
Series
The journey to becoming a data-informed legal team.
You'll look at using common, data-informed language, so everyone in the business is on the same page, and examine how to use data in the narrative to show your legal team’s value and justify its existence.
Webinar
Metrics for in-house lawyers: how to use data to your advantage and where to start.
LawVu Insights
Learn more about LawVu's analytics and reporting module for in-house legal teams.
Whitepaper
Measuring what matters
Download 'A guide to metrics for the in-house legal department'