Data Visualization: Presenting Legal Metrics That Compel

Thanks to modern legal software, you can quantitatively measure and manage the work your legal department undertakes, but that doesn't mean you can throw a spreadsheet at your executives and assume it will convey the business value of your legal team. You have to share the right metrics in the right way. Here's a quick rundown on some metrics that matter, and how to present them in the best light.

Show legal isn't a roadblock

• Metrics: Time with stakeholders
• Visualization: Pie chart

Anecdotally, the number-one reason in-house legal teams adopt legal software is to prove that legal review isn't holding up critical sales deals and company projects. A contract lifecycle management (CLM) solution should make it easy to show the "stages" of a contract—request, draft, approval, execution—and which users or departments had control of the contract in each stage.

Specifically, create a graphic to show the amount of time a contract is "with" each stakeholder, including the counterparty, as a pie chart. It should become pretty clear that legal isn't the one "holding up" a contract -- the counterparty usually sits on an agreement longer than everyone else, followed by the final signatories outside the legal team.

This metric is useful to show for any one legal agreement, as well as the sum of time spent on all contracts for a given week, month, quarter, or year. Legal's slice will likely be smaller than every other stakeholder's, and that's a good thing.

Show legal is getting faster

• Metrics: Time With Legal, Time to Close
• Visualization: Bar graphs

Just because legal isn't the slowest department when it comes to processing contracts doesn't mean you can't get better at closing deals. (In fact, getting your job done faster is one of the main benefits of legal software.) Take that same time with legal value. You built a pie chart around it and show how it has (hopefully) decreased over time. That's an acceptable metric on its own, but your revenue operations team can make it even more compelling. Your Sales department likely has a Time to Close metric that shows how long it takes a sales opportunity to move into either a win or a loss. 

Show Time With Legal and Time to Close bar graphs in pairs, and you can illustrate whether legal speed translates into Sales velocity, whether seasonality (the Q4 push!) affects legal as much as sales, and the overall efficiency of your sales and legal operations.

Show how much legal is getting done

• Metrics: Request volume, requests completed, requests completion percentage
• Visualization: Line graphs

The legal team receives a certain number of requests or tasks every week, month, or quarter, and it completes some (high) percentage of those requests. While stakeholders understand how many requests they make of Legal, few outside the legal department know how many legal requests are made in total. That number alone is worth sharing, but showing how much of that work gets done—and how that rate changes over time—is invaluable.

A trio of line graphs—one showing the total request volume, a second showing the number of requests completed, and a third showing the percentage of open requests marked completed—per period can illustrate both how much work legal is getting done and how much work the legal team is being asked to do. 

Seasonality may again rear its head here, as can under-resourcing. If the volume of requests increases, the number completed stays level, and the completion percentage falls, that's a pretty good indicator that you need more help (be it headcount, software, or both).

Do it all with LinkSquares

If you're looking for an enterprise legal management (ELM) platform that can track all these critical legal metrics and more, look no further than LinkSquares. With a comprehensive Legal Cloud that can gather, prioritize, accelerate, and analyze your every legal function, it's the answer to not only demonstrating the value of legal, but increasing it.

If you're ready to ramp up your legal metrics, contact LinkSquares today.