In-House Legal Tip: Embrace Legal KPIs

1 min • 17 Oct 23

“If legal teams want to be considered as core to the overall business, then they must operate in the same way as the rest of the business. This means embracing data based decision making and performance reporting.” - Matthew Glynn (Managing Director, GLS Group)

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.

Actionable Insights: KPIs give you actionable insights that improve decision making.
Value Recognition: KPI data allows you to demonstrate the value of your legal team in objective terms.
Business Language: objective numbers have and will always be the language of business. Legal teams need to embrace this.
Inefficiency Capture: KPIs are a great way to identify and target process/performance inefficiencies.
Pattern Recognition: data over time reveals performance patterns – some good and some bad. Either way – you need to know.
Goal Setting: KPIs allow you to bring a tangible and ideally objective basis to goal setting.
Performance Management: KPIs can give you near real- time data to ensure processes remain optimized.
Performance Review: hard data is the best basis from which to tell a “good story” when it comes to performance reviews (individual or departmental).
Performance Culture: potent and well- chosen KPIs can make a positive contribution to the creation of a “performance culture”.
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

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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.