A decade ago, tracking most kinds of metrics in the legal department was like playing a guessing game. Quantifying legal’s work and the overall team’s performance likely involved some sketchy math.
Now, a Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) tool can provide accurate figures on finalized agreements, common contract types, and redline status in seconds – a testament to the legal’s adoption of technology in the last few years.
Data from your CLM platform gives insight into your whole team’s performance — individual counsel, the entire legal department, and the business as a whole. A CLM dashboard shows how your contracts perform internally and externally, allowing for deeper dives into both your team’s achievements and their processes' weak spots.
Here are some ways you can use data to track team performance.
CLM data can help you track an individual in-house teammate’s performance. If you’ve created hiring or strategic plans for your department, it’s important that you’re able to assess the performance of your new and existing teammates while carrying them out.
A robust CLM solution provides visibility into your team’s workload and performance against goals. In LinkSquares, for example, you can see which teammate is working on what contract at any given time, and see how long it’s been in their hands. You can also zoom out and see how many contracts each team member has executed. Use CLM data to track the individual performance against the team as a whole, and against company goals.
CLM data can be used to prove the value of the legal team to the whole company. Before, all legal had to do was protect the business from risk. Now, legal must contribute to the bottom line, and you need data to make your case as a strategic business unit to justify your budget requests.
Luckily, the metrics you focused on for individual teammates can be expanded outwards to look at the department as a whole.
For example: In your CLM dashboard, you can track legal department performance metrics like the number of contracts executed in a quarter or a year, the average length of time it takes between creating and finalizing agreements, and the number of executed contracts vs. the number of in-flight contracts. These give you a clear picture of your team’s productivity.
You can also see where the bottlenecks are and make plans for improvement. Now, you’ll know how busy your team has been and whether or not you need to increase department headcount.
The data in CLM doesn’t only show how the legal team is performing. It can also indicate the health of the overall business. That’s one benefit of running all business contracts through a single CLM tool.
Not only can you see what the total value of contracts executed within a certain time frame is, but you know the value of contracts that are currently open. Using this data, you can make accurate forecasts and projections for your business, which is especially necessary if you plan to undergo any kind of M&A activity in the near future.
With insight from your CLM dashboard, you can see what types of clients you do the most business with and measure reality against assumptions. You can also refine your strategy to reduce churn by mapping trends across contracts that don’t renew and finding ways to provide more value to customers.
A CLM dashboard organizes critical business data in a way that provides value to your teammates, department, and company as a whole. Configuring your metrics to track team performance gives you insight into what’s working well, what isn’t, and where there are opportunities for growth.
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