In-House Legal Tip: Embrace Legal KPIs

The idea of subjecting yourself to ongoing performance assessments might seem a little daunting. 

However, this is precisely what high-performers in every walk of life do. 

Elite performers track all key aspects of their performance, and examine the data for insights that offers pathways to improved performance. 

In-house legal teams are not striving for gold medals – but they do need to deliver “better, faster, cheaper, and safer” … each and every year. 

So here are 10 reasons why your legal team needs to start embracing KPIs. 

1. Actionable Insights: KPIs give you actionable insights that improve decision making.
2. Value Recognition: KPI data allows you to demonstrate the value of your legal team in objective terms. 
3. Business Language: objective numbers have and will always be the language of business. Legal teams need to embrace this.
4. Inefficiency Capture: KPIs are a great way to identify and target process/performance inefficiencies.
5. Pattern Recognition: data over time reveals performance patterns – some good and some bad. Either way – you need to know.
6. Goal Setting: KPIs allow you to bring a tangible and ideally objective basis to goal setting.
7. Performance Management: KPIs can give you near real- time data to ensure processes remain optimized.
8. Performance Review: hard data is the best basis from which to tell a “good story” when it comes to performance reviews (individual or departmental).
9. Performance Culture: potent and well- chosen KPIs can make a positive contribution to the creation of a “performance culture”.
10. Coming Ready Or Not: all business functions operate by reference to data collection and performance reporting. Legal has been one of the “last hold-outs” – but that is over now. So, either embrace KPIs yourself, or someone else will impose them upon you!

The GLS Knowledge Centre includes has plenty of GLS insights on KPIs – do not forget to check them out! 

If you want more in-house legal team performance and career insights – please do join the GLS Legal Operations Community 

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. 

© The GLS Group - Law Rewritten