New General Counsel Dashboard puts critical data at your fingertips

Data is critical currency for today’s in-house counsel. With peers in marketing, sales, and operations already fluent in data-driven leadership, General Counsel are increasingly expected to run the legal function “like a business” – and that requires metrics, KPIs, and reporting.

Even when there is no immediate pressure from the wider business, legal leaders who use data to represent the value of the legal function at executive leadership level have an opportunity to elevate their position as strategic business partners and increase the legal function’s impact on the business.

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Leveraging data can be a challenge for General Counsel. This is often because:

• Structured data is either unavailable or difficult to access due to an absence of technology or processes to capture it.
• Data is available but is not comprehensive. Without a central source of truth, collating information takes multiple manual steps.
• Creating impactful visual reports that will resonate with the business is difficult, requiring time or specialty skill sets that legal teams don’t have.

In fact, 66 percent of respondents to the 2024 In-house Legal Technology Report say they spend more than an hour a day compiling assets needed for reporting, with 30 percent spending three or more hours a day on this work.

The good news is that by using the right technology – such as a legal workspace which includes legal reporting software – in-house legal departments can become data-driven, and GCs can show up at the exec table as a more credible strategic business partner.

Learn more about why GCs love the LawVu Legal Workspace 

LawVu’s GC Dashboard provides an actionable view of all your legal work – in real time

The General Counsel (GC) dashboard is the newest of LawVu’s standard reports, all of which are designed to save time, give legal teams more actionable insights, and foster stronger relationships with the business by showcasing their value.  The GC Dashboard makes it incredibly easy for legal leaders to use critical real-time data in an impactful way with three key features:

Feature 1: A consolidated view of key metrics for all legal work and spend

The GC Dashboard combines best practice data points about matters, legal workload and projects, contract work, spend management, and use of legal technology into one view.

Benefits:

• Removes administrative burden and reduces the time it takes to get a unified view of activity and metrics across all legal work.
• Makes it easy to share a foundational report which showcases the entire workload of the legal team and creates a jumping off point for deeper discussions.

Feature 2: Impactful data visualizations in a single dashboard

Using easy to understand and shareable visualizations, the GC Dashboard displays the most common metrics used by legal leaders, with the option to use LawVu’s out of the box functional dashboards and slice and dice reporting capability to generate more specific reports if necessary.

Benefits:

• Out of the box, ready to use dashboards take work off your plate (or reduce admin time for your team members).
• If you are new to using data, these dashboards will get you started and give your business a great initial view into your team’s work and value.
• Compelling visualizations engage stakeholders and make data easy to interpret without requiring excessive effort or expertize.

Feature 3: Designed for spotting trends and insights

Legal dashboards should showcase trends and make it easy for legal leaders to dig deeper in real time – after all, turning a data point into a meaningful KPI or data story requires additional context. The GC Dashboard is designed to work out of the box as a compelling standard report, while also making it easy to access more meaningful insights. Benefits:

• You can easily refine the data on your dashboard by time period, so it’s quick and effortless to share reports in alignment with your preferred business reporting cadence.
• By using features like drill through, or by simply jumping to another LawVu dashboard, you can access the granular detail that you need to prepare for meetings, or to ask and answer key questions in real time.

How to use the GC Dashboard

There are many ways that GCs and legal leaders can use data in their departments today – from setting critical KPIs to balancing workloads. Here are some of the use cases the new GC Dashboard supports:

• Generate quarterly and monthly reporting for the board or executive team, showing the work the legal team has in flight.
• Share trends and insights with executive colleagues to drive collaboration on projects or mobile action – for example, identifying opportunities to automate contract work or reduce legal requests with self service.
• Quickly share updates to manage high risk matters (including trends over time).
• Leverage the data across your reports to evaluate, share and track business engagement with the legal team.
• Easily communicate and evaluate internal and external legal spend to ensure that work is being completed as intended.
• Use reports in budget and planning meetings to plan for additional headcount in the legal team and justify the benefit to the business.
• Identify gaps in capability compared to needs, for staffing and training and development purposes.
• Show impact and outcomes of investment in legal technology and strategic initiatives.

And that’s just for starters. When you have data at your fingertips, you’ll find endless ways to better manage your team, improve operations, and engage with business leaders.

Create a scalable data-driven function with a legal workspace

The value that you can leverage from the GC Dashboard is extensive – as long as you have the data in place to do it.  The good news is that with the right legal tech, you can create a valuable data set and start using it relatively quickly. The better news? Data creation happens automatically while you’re taking advantage of legal workspace features which streamline workflows across your legal team. For example:

• A good matter management solution with flexible intake capabilities will capture structured data in a centralized repository, while reducing back and forth with the business and speeding up cycle times.

• A contract lifecycle management system which automates high volume, low value contracts to speed up cycle times and save legal resources automatically creates data around contract volume and turnaround times.
• E-billing and spend management solutions replace slow, risky manual invoice review processes with automated ones, quickly capturing key data points that you can use to report on spend, control costs and manage budgets.

Any of these common legal technology solutions can generate value and data, and should have easy-to-use dashboards built in. However, a legal workspace – a modern ELM designed specifically to let legal teams manage spend, intake, matters, and contracts all in one place – takes things to the next level.

Because a legal workspace tames all of your legal workflows within one system, it eliminates the need to generate reports across multiple systems. By creating a single source of truth, it reduces time and effort, dramatically simplifying the reporting process.

How to get started with the GC Dashboard

For LawVu customers, the GC Dashboard is immediately available – and it comes ready-populated with the data from your legal workspace. Simply navigate to your standard reports to access the dashboard.

If you’re interested in learning more about the data behind the dashboard, head to the help center for further insights.

If you’re not using LawVu yet, or have not yet implemented all of the capabilities and modules available within the workspace, book a demo today.