In-House Legal Tip: Evidence Your Contributions

1min • 11 Apr 23

If you cannot measure what your in-house team has done, they have not done it.

It is simple, if you cannot produce hard data that speaks to the contributions of your in-house legal team, then your team will very likely be undervalued within your business.
Old-school in-house leaders will tell you that “the” most important metric of in-house legal team performance is what your internal client thinks. And they are absolutely 100% wrong. Embracing this kind of thinking will ensure that your in-house legal team remains habitually underappreciated.
Let’s be clear here: Yes, relationships with your internal clients are INCREDIBLY important. This is not in dispute. However, you SHOULD NEVER allow the value of your legal team to be judged solely by what people think of you.

Why do we say this? Well, there are a few good reasons:

1. Your internal supporters may come and go (leave the company, get transferred, etc.).
2. Your internal client is not actually able to see the full spectrum of value that your legal team creates.
3. Your legal team relies on you (as the team leader) to ensure the business recognizes its contribution.
4. By demonstrating the “full value” of your contributions, you can easily and readily increase legal team recognition.
5. Numerical data is the language of business, and you, like all other departments, should be using it.

As such – to succeed as an in-house leader, you need to embrace the role of hard data (in addition to positive internal client commentary) to evidence the contributions that your legal team makes.
Every chance you get, you need to make your case in the “language of business” i.e. in numbers.
A good way to ensure that you are not overlooking an opportunity to capture the value of your legal team is to adopt the mantra:

“If the contribution cannot be evidenced in numbers, then it was not made.”

Obviously, not everything can be recorded – but if you ever have to choose between different projects, choose the one that is capable of yielding empirical performance data!

Ready To Transform Your Legal Team?

Please check out the GLS solutions and know-how resources listed on the right side of this page – they might assist your legal team with the issues explored in this Blog.