LinkSquares' Sr. Director of Legal, Ashlyn Donahue, participated in a recent webinar with Shawn Hoyt, commercial legal leader at OutSystems, to debate the best ways to use metrics to communicate the value of your legal team.
Ashlyn got straight to the point with this assertion: "Seventy percent of legal leaders believe that lack of clear metrics hurts their strategic influence. And one of the sayings that I've heard that I really think resonates well with me is every other business team brings data to the table. And historically, legal has maybe lagged behind in this department."Shawn challenged the assumption that other departments are always more advanced in metrics. "I'm often surprised at how organizations have access to a lot of data, like a marketing team or a product team [but] oftentimes just haven't organized themselves well in terms of knowing what they can track that really impacts the top line of the business or the company's strategic goals. And in some of the companies that I've been at, I find that legal is actually kind of in the middle of the pack or somewhat is even ahead of the pack than functions that you would think would be a well oiled machine."
Both speakers emphasized that legal teams, especially on the commercial side, sit on rich datasets, particularly contract and transaction data, that can be leveraged to inform broader business strategy.
However, Shawn emphasized that those metrics must be aligned with strategic goals.
"I think everyone's minds, when it comes to legal data, first jumps to volume data. You know, how many contracts am I handling? How many contracts per lawyer? Basically work that just tracks the level of effort of the legal team. But that doesn't really move the needle, typically, in terms of the company's overall goal.
"Looking at the data integration between LinkSquares and Salesforce … we were able to show that when customers accepted the online terms and conditions, they became a customer on average about eighty days faster than if they wanted to negotiate custom terms and conditions. And so that really caused a light bulb to go on for a lot of our business people."
That was just one example of the anecdotes and insights found in the webinar. Ashlyn and Shawn also outlined four key metric categories:
This duo went on to discuss how to turn these types of metrics into compelling narratives for a variety of stakeholders and audiences, all of which can help legal deliver more value to the business, and get credit for that value, too.
If you want to learn how to measure and communicate the organizational value of your legal team, watch the full webinar here.
And if you're ready to adopt the legal tools that help you gather and communicate these crucial metrics, contact LinkSquares today!