Knowledge is power

If you track metrics of what you do, you will better understand how your money is being spent, identify areas of potential savings, and be able to measure and compare the performance of your legal department and your law firms.

Benchmarking can be undertaken of:

your department against accepted best practice,
your department performance against past performance
your law firms against each other,

Internal Performance

Often, legal departments have no idea how they compare in terms of legal spend, arrangements with external lawyers, or internal headcount and other staffing metrics.

Evaluating the performance of the legal department against benchmarks enables you to meet the challenge of demonstrating the value of the department to the business and that you are demonstrating best practice. This is often of concern to other areas of the business, such as finance.

External Performance

Benchmarking external law firm performance has multiple advantages, including the ability to demonstrate best practice to other areas of the business, such as procurement, and the engendering of a spirit of competition amongst your law firms.

With the specifics of measurables, you can have profitable discussions with law firms about areas where improvements are required, and ideally tie payment to performance.

But benchmarking only works well if you carefully identify KPIs which tie to your objectives, communicate these to your law firms, and provide feedback of the results of monitoring performance to benchmarks.

We can assist in defining meaningful benchmarks, establishing monitoring systems and feedback protocols and helping you design a true value pricing model which ties payment to results and performance.