Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) have long been an essential tool for many businesses, but recent technological advancements have made the benefits of KPIs much easier to realize -- especially for legal teams. In fact, there are many reasons why KPIs are uniquely valuable to the overall growth and sustainability of legal operations.
"KPIs" refer to valuable metrics about your operations. Any collected data that can help you identify where your team performs best, or where improvements and adjustments may be needed, can be labeled as a “KPI.” By analyzing specific practices and their corresponding results, KPIs aid in both the inception and achievement of your organization's goals.
Here are just a few areas of your legal department that can be enhanced through the use of KPIs.
3 KPI Areas for Legal Teams
Accountability - Legal teams have a particular obligation to keep track of what goes right or wrong, and which parties are responsible for failures and successes. The same zeal that legal teams use to assign responsibility and collect on obligations can be used to enhance your performance as a legal operation. By using KPIs to track individual performance across your team, like who is reviewing the most contracts for example, you can more easily correct and prevent mistakes as well as incentivize practices that benefit your organization. Modern contract management software has finally made it practical to track these data points.
Tracking Growth - When KPIs aren’t established and properly tracked, it’s difficult to understand how the legal department contributes to the growth of a business. By tracking relevant legal KPIs, companies can get a better idea of specific legal practices that result in an increase in revenue, or conversely, which practices might ultimately be hindering growth. Tracking and presenting on average close times, new effective agreements, and automatic renewals shows how the legal team is contributing to business goals. Contract analysis software can both track and optimize these KPIs.
Contract Management - You might already be utilizing software to make your team more efficient throughout the lifecycle of a contract, but establishing KPIs can give your contract management tools a more clear objective and take your practice to the next level. By measuring efficiency at each step in the process, you’ll end up with a more comprehensive picture of how best to cut down on drafting time, or how to be more cost-effective in your allocation of resources.
The emergence of sophisticated technology to support Legal's objectives has made the various benefits infinitely more measurable and immediate. Whether you have been looking for more accountability, growth, or efficient contract management processes within your legal team, a focused and deliberate KPI campaign will help you reach your goals.
If you're ready to turn your legal team into a growth asset, you need to use KPIs to manage your legal operation. And, if you're ready to adopt the end-to-end Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) suite that can help you set and manage your KPIs to ultimate effect, contact LinkSquares today.