Welcome back to the blog series on transforming legal operations at your company. If you still need to complete the first two posts, start here. If you’re all caught up – let’s just right in and talk data!
We recently heard a top legal operations director speak on the necessity of data gathering. She shared: “You’ve got to know how your team is doing at all times – from budgets and spending to contracts, cases, and outcomes.”
The difference between an average legal operations team and an awesome one isn’t the ability to fix broken things. We all know that most broken-things lists are endless! Top teams assess brokenness in light of value loss. Sub-par teams don’t see or know the difference.
Instead, force data-driven insights to dictate what you do.
KPIs for Legal
Critical to this is defining and monitoring key metrics within your legal department. Regardless of your industry, here are some of the data points to monitor:
- Contract turnaround time
- Contract volumes
- Percent of contracts on company paper vs. third-party paper
- Contract types (broken down by business area)
- Average total time spent redlining agreements
Around these metrics, legal ops can build a high-return strategy. For example, turnaround time and contract complexity will drive your plan to right-source work (e.g. - using automation/tech for low-risk efforts) and make sure you maximize top lawyers’ time or redeploy expensive FTEs to other projects.
Knowing the makeup of agreements on third-party paper helps shore up negotiating leverage – a potentially high-value legal ops project. Similarly, by capturing the time spent on various contract generation, negotiations, and deal approval steps, legal can prove its value and make a case for additional resources. That includes increased headcount, technology, and process improvement.
For long-term legal ops success, data capture and monitoring is essential to prove department ROI. One leader told us that most teams “start from zero.” That is – zero data, tracked metrics, or understanding of productivity, volumes, or spend.
Leaders must use data to establish a baseline, gauge progress, and illuminate value creation. These practices, according to Jeff Franke, former chief of staff to the GC at Yahoo!, ultimately lead legal to run “with efficiency and effectiveness.”
LinkSquares Can Help
LinkSquares offers Dashboards that show the status of every legal agreement in your contract repository. From drafts to redlines to executed agreements, you can know where every contract is, who is responsible for moving it to execution, and how long before the agreement is ready to impact revenue.
Beyond a status dashboard, LinkSquares also offers a customizable reporting suite, letting you convert unstructured legal documents into actionable, structured reports and insights. If you want to become a true partner to the larger organization, you need to arm your legal team with the data – and data-driven efficiency – that can earn them a seat at the management table.
If you're ready to adopt the most effective solutions for legal ops – and harness cutting-edge artificial intelligence to improve every aspect of your legal department – then contact LinkSquares today.
