7 Metrics Every Legal Professional Needs to Know

Whether you're an experienced professional or a recent law school graduate, data plays a crucial role in shaping strategy, collaborating with business leaders, and establishing your personal brand as a trusted partner.

Without verifiable metrics, you risk making educated guesses without any solid data to support your assertions. So, how can you ensure you're selecting the right metrics for your board, boss, or team to review, thus enabling informed decision-making for future actions?

In the era of data-driven decision making, legal teams also need to measure and manage key data metrics to establish their role as business partners. From managing legal intake requests to streamlining the agreement process, these metrics play a crucial role.

Here are 7 indispensable metrics that every legal professional should know to optimize their contribution to business impact.

Total signed agreements in your contract lifecycle management (CLM) system gives you an overview of the workload your legal staff is handling. It enumerates how many legal agreements are there in your contract repository, thus needing regular monitoring and review.

LinkSquares customer, Tealium maximizes productivity with LinkSquares' customizable dashboard, tailoring data visualization to suit specific team and organizational needs, enabling comprehensive analysis of contract metrics for informed decision-making and growth tracking.

This metric helps in understanding how often your team gets involved in setting terms for customers, vendors, and partners by comparing internally drafted agreements against agreements on third-party paper.

Drafting, redlining, finalizing, and executing a contract require time. If this time is substantial, you might need to address your process, your staff, or both.

The time taken to close an agreement on your paper should ideally be quicker than on someone else's. If it’s not, there’s an issue that needs immediate attention.

Knowing where you’re spending most of your time during the agreement process (internal review, counterparty review, ready for signature, out for signature) can help you understand what’s slowing down deals and identify areas for process improvement.

This metric gives you an insight into how many requests your team fields from business stakeholders. It’s vital to track the work your team does outside contracts, such as requests related to licensing, IP, litigation, HR concerns, marketing review, and more.

Understanding the volume of agreements added to your contract repository each month or quarter helps gauge workload volume and forms a vital starting point for your contract management strategy.

By understanding and managing these key metrics, legal professionals can effectively measure their team's productivity, report the quantitative impact of their work, and correct problems in the contract development process. This way, the legal team becomes a source of revenue, not just intake.

LinkSquares offers the most advanced contract analytics suite on the market, providing legal professionals with the tools and data they need to work efficiently and effectively across the company. If you're ready to embark on your journey towards a metrics-driven legal team, contact LinkSquares today.