Key Performance Indicators for Your Legal Department

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are important management practices for any legal department. They are metrics that can help businesses attain organizational goals and must be clear, measurable, and attainable.

If you want to enhance the effectiveness of your legal department, you need to think strategically about what aspects of your organization’s performance you want to improve, according to a PwC blog post. Here is a holistic overview of the KPIs that should be tracked.

• Contract quantity will measure the number of contracts the legal department has completed over a certain period. This is particularly helpful when measuring how effectively a business manages contracts.
• Contract processing measures the overall time needed to collaborate on legal agreements and is integral to understanding what areas within the contract processing time need improvement and how the organization can collect revenue.
• Budget vs. actual spend tracks the time and cost per matter and highlights where it is possible to save costs and where there are inefficient processes.
• Intellectual property is used to track the number of patents, copyrights, and trademarks applied for versus those granted. It will indicate the costs and success rate associated with each intellectual property asset.
• Client satisfaction can highlight what needs to be improved and make the business successful by analyzing the number of client referrals, client retention rates, and survey results.

Legal Ops can implement these KPIs to support their assessment of the organization and business. Defining the most critical issues and tracking them is essential in helping the legal function and department.