If you’re serious about proving your value in 2024, now’s the time to start building out your legal metrics dashboard.
There’s an old saying that goes, “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.” So, instead of focusing on all the metrics you should have been monitoring all along, think about the ones you need to start tracking today to showcase the value you drive for the business in the future. The metrics you track should highlight your team’s accomplishments, department spend, process efficiencies, and overall performance.
Still trying to figure out where to start? Here are five legal metrics to start measuring today.
Contract volume measures how many contracts move through the legal team during a given period. It’s a strong indicator of how busy your team is. Tracking contract volume over time also helps you to plan for seasonal capacity more accurately.
Contract volume by type tells you how many of a certain type of contract your team works on per month, quarter, or year. This metric lets you know the contracts you interface with most frequently and alerts you to automation or process efficiency opportunities.
Track your average close time by measuring the time between creating and executing the contract. Knowing your average close time helps you understand how long things take, communicate lead time, and improve the contract process.
This metric is critical in understanding whether or not the contracts you spend your valuable time on result in revenue for the company. If there’s a wide gap between these two numbers, you’ll know it’s time to reassess your approach to contracts with your collaborators.
Monitor how assignments are being distributed across your team — how many tasks each in-house professional is working on, how long it takes, and how successful their efforts are. This allows you to track team performance, offer support when needed, and celebrate your team when they pull off the impossible.
These metrics can’t be collected by hand. But using legal technology like contract lifecycle management (CLM) puts the metrics that matter right at legal’s fingertips.
With LinkSquares, for example, legal can extract contract data using AI and use it to populate your legal metrics dashboard. You can also visualize your data and share metrics with key stakeholders across the business.
Even if you’re diligently tracking emails in a well-organized spreadsheet, manual processes won’t provide the level of insight you need into your team’s performance. But with legal technology, your team has centralized access to contract data via your legal metrics dashboard.
You can use it to track metrics like contract volume, average close time, and total signed agreements, then create a custom visualization to show off all your hard work. With all these at the ready, you can prove your value to the business in no time.