Unleashing the Power of Legal Metrics with Custom Dashboards

In today's business landscape, data is the most valuable currency. Organizations must make data-driven decisions, and as such, it’s critical for in-house legal teams to adapt and bring their own metrics to the table. 

While other business units have straightforward KPIs to report, legal’s can be a bit more nuanced. However, your contract lifecycle management (CLM) solution is a data gold mine with the right dashboards in place. In this blog post, we delve into the importance of data-driven practices for in-house teams. We’ll also share how LinkSquares’ own legal team leverages Custom Dashboards to provide next-level transparency into their day-to-day work.

What key metrics are legal teams are tracking today? 

To make sure your metrics are impactful, consider your unique use case, including the questions you want to answer and the data you value most. Every key data metric has some key components: it must be measurable, actionable, and meaningful to your business. Here are some helpful metrics to get started: 

3 Key Metrics: 

• How many agreements were ready for signature each month/quarter? How many contracts did you tee up for other departments to execute? This is your “true” measure of legal productivity when you don’t control who signs or how fast. 

• How many agreements were executed each month/quarter? The difference between this figure and your ready-for-signature number allows you to identify if there are problems in getting contracts executed. 
• What’s the average close time for all agreements? How long does it take to draft, redline, finalize and execute any contract, measured from agreement creation to agreement signature. If this number is long by your organization’s standards, you may need to address your process, your people, or both.

For a full list of key metrics that every legal team should track, grab this guide.

How can LinkSquares help?

When it comes to data, it can be difficult to fit squarely into the standard mold. And while the standard dashboards in both Analyze and Finalize offer powerful out-of-the-box insights, you may have niche metrics you want to pull that are specific to your business. 

That’s where LinkSquares Custom Dashboards come in. Our in-house Dashboards team can work with you to tailor data visualizations to fit the needs of your business. Whether it’s reporting out to executives on time spent on contracts, workload transparency across your team, or detailed metrics in preparation for M&A activity, if the data exists in your system, we can personalize visualizations to your liking.

How the LinkSquares Legal Team Leverages Custom Dashboards to Deliver Key Data Metrics 

Your legal team will elevate their status within the organization by demonstrating the impact of their work with data. While it’s key to leverage data from your CLM solution, contracts only account for a portion of the legal team’s work. It's important to consider how technology, such as a legal task management solution, can be leveraged to provide a more holistic view of the legal department’s measurable impact on the organization. 

Custom Dashboards are so powerful, LinkSquares’ own legal team uses them everyday. Jonathan Greenblatt, VP of Legal, and Ashlyn Donohue, Director of Legal, worked with our in-house Dashboards team to curate the custom metrics they need to easily report out to the executive team as well as get better insights into their workload. 

Here’s a snapshot of how they leverage Custom Dashboards in Finalize: 

• Total Unique Deals Worked by Legal: This measures the number of unique requests that legal supported over a period of time (as measured by looking at deals where Legal uploaded a version into either ‘Internal Review’ or ‘Counterparty Review’ status, or where the legal team approved a task). The metric is displayed as a total number at the top of the dashboard, with further break-outs to show trends over a period of time (including breakouts that show which member of the team worked on the deal). 

• Agreement Versions Uploaded: This tile dives a bit deeper into the complexity of those unique deals worked by tracking the number of versions uploaded to either party or counterparty review by a member of the legal team. This is also displayed as a total number at the top of the dashboard, with further break-out in a bar chart that shows trends over a period of time (including by legal team member supporting the request). 

• Unique Deals by Template Group: This gives a breakdown of deals supported by legal by the template type over a period of time. This metric is helpful to see where the volume of your work really sits, and identifies key trends indicating where processes could be improved.

• Time in Legal Queue: This metric looks at the total amount of time pending legal review for requests supported by Legal. It’s measured by looking at time spent in “Internal Review” status prior to the legal approval task being completed. This is helpful to understand SLAs.
• Hours Worked (Between Upload and Approval): Tracks the average time spent on  the agreement, from the first time legal is engaged to when it’s approved by legal.  

Every company is going to have different behavior and their own processes. The true power of Custom Dashboards is that they can be personalized to your work. While your metrics will differ from those above, the key concepts that are universally important to track fall into three buckets: 

• How much work is being done?
• What is the turnaround time of your team?
• Where is your legal team focusing its time, and what types of requests are they most frequently supporting?

When it comes to Custom Dashboards across the LinkSquares Cloud, the options are limitless –  as long as the data exists in LinkSquares, we can help you make sense of it. The sooner you start shaping the data, the better position you will be in. Have some key metrics in mind? Reach out to your Customer Success Manager or book some time with the team today, and we’ll help you unlock the possibilities of your CLM data.