In the legal realm, maintaining transparency and accountability within in-house counsel can be a convoluted task. Since we primarily use numbers to comfortably dwell in the business environment, it is necessary to design an interface that speaks the language of the business world. A legal score card, if carefully curated, can be a practical tool to manage and market your department as it presents a quantitative representation of your legal team’s work.
Firstly, it is imperative to keep track of the contracts your team produces, which can be conveniently achieved with contracts software, thereby recording the statistics for each type. You may even trace time factors involved in processes like initial editing or completion periods.
Tracking these numbers offers a useful oversight over the value that your team brings to the table, allowing you to monitor the workload variation across quarters and years. An interesting way to measure productivity is by computing ratios; for instance, you can calculate the average contracts a member of your team is capable of producing. This data-backed approach supports justifying the need for additional resources or legal tech expenditures, based on the increase in contract creation or product management requirements.
For instance, if every lawyer can support three product managers and there are plans to add more product managers to the team, it would require hiring additional legal representation. This approach also applies to different specialized legal roles, such as deal lawyers, litigation lawyers, and so on.
When adopting a scorecard system, it’s crucial to understand legal expenses in relation to your company’s revenues, requiring a continual review of the percentages spent in-house versus spending on outside counsel. Keeping track of percentages and their trends can guide financial decisions to curb budget expenditure or hire more in-house lawyers.
With a scorecard, you can keep track of metrics defining your department’s efficiency and satisfaction. This includes employee satisfaction scores for individual teams or even the legality department’s risk tolerance. Considering your internal clients as customers and regularly generating feedback can contribute significantly to understanding and addressing dissatisfaction.
While it’s important to keep track of efficiencies, it’s equally important to balance them with quality measures. If you’re tracking the number of hotline complaints and ethics inquiries, realize that a lower number isn’t necessarily good. Scenarios where employees are afraid to speak up, or the hotline is difficult to access could skew these numbers.
Whether your in-house legal team is small or large, understanding your numbers is vital to improvement. An effective legal scorecard serves as a management tool, which communicates your department’s value to business stakeholders in a language they understand, fostering transparency and engagement.