Track or Fall Behind: Why In-House Teams Must Leverage Legal KPIs

The Underappreciation of In-House Legal Teams 

Most in-house legal teams face a common challenge - despite their immense contributions to the business, their value often goes unrecognised. Why? Because many legal teams miss out on leveraging legal KPIs to quantify their impact and justify their resource needs. 

If you think this doesn’t apply to your team, ask yourself:  

◼️ Where are the resources your team needs?  

◼️ Why don’t you have the headcount necessary to operate effectively?  

◼️ Why are team members leaving your team?  

◼️ Why is the internal business treating legal as just another support function?  

If you find yourself grappling with these issues, the hard truth is that what you’ve been doing is not resonating with the business. Legal teams must learn to speak the language of business - data. 

No Data, No Recognition 

In-house legal teams can no longer rely on persuasive arguments alone. Businesses operate on hard data - data that demonstrates the basis of decisions, tracks performance, identifies trends, informs strategic direction, and evidences outcomes.  

If legal teams fail to track their impact using objective data, they risk falling further behind in gaining recognition and securing the resources they need. 

The time has come to start tracking and measuring legal performance in a way that proves value to the business. 

In this blog, we will outline the essential Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that legal teams should be tracking, particularly within the contracting function, to provide data-based insights into performance. 
 

Essential KPIs for In-House Legal Teams Managing Contracting 

◼️ Contracts Under Management: The number of live contracts and contracts under negotiation. 

◼️ Contract Closure Time: The time from receipt of instruction to execution of the agreement. 

◼️ Number of Disputes: Percentage of total contracts under management that result in disputes. 

◼️ Contracts Handled Per Legal Team Member: A measure of workload distribution and efficiency. 

◼️ Commercial Value Seepage: Instances where contract mismanagement leads to financial loss (e.g., late payment penalties, missed milestones). 

◼️ Instructions Received by the Legal Team: A reflection of demand and resource allocation needs. 

◼️ Number of Meetings Attended: Physical or virtual meetings that legal is involved in to support business operations. 

These Legal KPIs offer deep insights into a legal team’s effort, contribution, and business-enabling capacity. But more than that, they provide hard, quantifiable data that can shape conversations with leadership and influence decision-making.