Key metrics that help your legal team make better decisions

Metrics and legal are two words that for many years, never the twain shall meet.

Now, thanks to the evolution of processes and technologies, in-house legal departments often have a wealth of metrics available to them to support vital decision making.

Below are just a few of the considerations that can be measured:

• Legal risk management,
• Monitoring of service providers and legal records,
• Operating budgets of legal activities,
• Organisation of the legal activity within the company.

Those considerations can help guide your decisions on:

• Budgeting,
• Resource allocation,
• Compliance and risk,
• External spend.

During my years working closely with in-house legal teams, I’ve seen first hand that departments who make the effort to incorporate metrics tend to do more lawyering and less administration. Additionally, those teams often have a bigger place at the table, able to demonstrate their value within the organisation and not just as another company expense.

Decisions made with metrics are clear, concise and if needed, defendable. Where are we spending most of our time as an internal team? Do we have too many external matters on that could have been done in-house? Do we need more people? The list of answerable questions are endless.
Metrics are an invaluable part of the in-house legal operations toolkit. One that, in my opinion everyone should be familiar with and utilise. In today’s world of falling budgets and increasing workloads, metrics tell the story of your department and the value your team provide.