Must-Have Performance Metrics For Law Departments
Rebecca Thorkildsen, Law360
Creating a meaningful performance measurement program is one of the biggest challenges for law department managers. It is relatively easy to identify a basic set of measures that would apply to most law departments. For example, most track department-level expenditures against annual budgets. Similarly, most law departments use outside legal service providers, and they typically monitor aggregate costs and run basic reports such as “Top 10 Most Expensive Matters” or “Outside Spend by Legal Service Provider.” Tracking this information over time is useful and necessary. (read the post)
Homemade Dashboard and Chips, Anyone?
Lisa Girmscheid, Legal Project Manager, Rockwell Automation, Inc.
Let’s face it – we don’t go to the trouble of implementing an e-billing and matter management system just so we can eliminate paper bills. Dashboards, metrics, KPIs – they are the Holy Grail of our existence. Dashboards are powerful tools that can help plan, monitor, measure and report how the law department manages things like appropriate staffing ratios, trends, outside law firm performance, budgets, matters and costs.
If someone asked me to describe the concept of a dashboard, I would compare it to something tangible, like salsa made fresh from your garden. (The Dashboard/Ginsu comparison led me to this idea, so bear with me, I promise this will eventually make sense.) (read the post)
Approximately one out of four law departments reported use of e-billing software in a survey
Rees Morrison, Law Department Management
Some 70 law departments that provided data to an ALM survey last year responded to a question about e-billing. Of them, 18 said they use an electronic billing program. The question did not differentiate between matter management and e-billing software, which often is the same these days. (read the post)
Seven revisions of the most common management tools of general counsel, based on my 2005 list of 18
Rees Morrison, Law Department Management
Thus, from the original list the common coin of general counsel in the management arena remain benchmarking, internal-expense budgets, matter-specific budgets for outside counsel, competitive bidding by firms, convergence, document management systems, electronic billing, intranet sites for law, matter management systems, off-site retreats, and personnel evaluations. (read the post)
How Metrics are Reinventing Operations in Legal Departments
Ari Kaplan, ReinventingProfessionals.com
I am in the process of finalizing a research report that will be released at LegalTech NY (click here for last year’s study) for which I spent most of the fall interviewing corporate counsel from across the country. With those conversations in mind, I recently had the chance to speak with David Samia, Vice President of Product Management and Marketing at Bridgeway Software, a provider of legal management tools for the Fortune 1000. We discussed how metrics are reinventing the way legal departments delivering their services. He shared his insights on changes that metrics are helping chief legal officers make and key best practices. (read the post, watch the video interview)
A typical set of outside counsel management activities, described at Marsh Mac
Rees Morrison, Law Department Management
In a recent interview, a senior lawyer at Marsh McLennan, Lucy Fato, recounted some history. “A few years ago, we started examining all the firms that we were using to come up with a preferred provider list in the U.S. and then we rolled it out in the U.K. (read the post)
An excerpt from InsideCounsel & Blickstein Group’s 4th Annual Law Department Operations Survey
Blane Erwin, Vice President Research, Bridgeway Software and 2011 LDO Survey Results Roundtable Participant
Question: Survey findings indicate that legal departments use e-billing to control external costs, even more so than aggressive rate negotiation and alternative fee arrangements. Surprising?
Response: E-billing systems provide insight into the activities and costs associated with outside counsel and have become indispensable for departments who desire greater control over external expenses. This control manifests itself in catching unexpected rate increases and billing errors, identifying which firms are performing which matter types, at what cost, and for what length of time. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that the most effective rate negotiations and alternative fee arrangements come from departments who have implemented e-billing solutions.
Question: How can legal departments make better use of their e-billing systems to control costs and gain more meaningful insights into their functions and relationships with outside counsel and providers?
Response: For many organizations, outside counsel fees represent a significant portion of their overall legal spend and e-billing solutions provide the insight necessary to control those associated costs. However, to truly optimize performance, gain greater efficiency and make more informed decisions, legal department executives need visibility into all costs associated with the service they deliver, both internal and external. As such, today’s legal departments require an integrated e-billing and matter management solution that provides complete financial transparency into the costs, performance, timeliness and outcomes of legal matters. With greater context into overall legal spend, organizations can analyze portfolios of legal services with metrics such as:
• Costs by time, by matter or by outcome
• Duration of time by matter, by firm or by outcome
• Hours worked by matter, by role or by task
As a result, they are able to analyze the costs, performance, and effectiveness of the legal services they provide, whether they’re provided with, or without, outside counsel. With this level of transparency, legal department executives are better prepared to demonstrate the value of the legal services their departments provide.
More work for in-house departments
Gail J. Cohen, Canadian Lawyer
The ACC poll showed that law departments are dealing with their greater workload in part by using more paralegals and contract lawyers. It also found about 67 per cent of law departments are lawyers with the rest made up of paralegals and other support staff. (read the article)
Kenneth Jones, Law Technology News
So, what do you do when a company-wide system is put in place to track costs in ways that do not meet the needs of a particular department? Initially, some “simple” approaches were tried. One was to pull all bills from law firms, but that failed because some of the work law firms do for a company is not “legal work” (consulting or advice for example). (read the article)
ILTA Roadshow
Lisa Girmscheid, Legal Project Mgr from Rockwell Automation, describes the alternative fee arrangements they are involved in and how they are managed. (watch the 2:55 clip)
