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)
Keeping it Relevant – What Do I Do with My New Matter Management System Now?
Louann Barnett, Duff & Phelps
Finally, the months of planning, vendor selection, design and implementation for your new state-of-the-art matter management system are over. The excitement level is high throughout the department as you flip the switch on the new system. Finished…at last, right? Not if you want all of the money, time and energy that went into the system to pay off.
Corporations often make the mistake of pulling all of their valuable resources and attention away from the matter management system at this point so that they can focus on new projects. But if you want to keep the system relevant, you can’t stop here.
Opportunities vs. Issues (read the article)
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)
Matter management dominates at LegalTech NY for in-house lawyers, and a few consultants appeared
Rees Morrison, Law Department Management
If you are with a law department, and if you are not interested in document review products – litigation support products, the pickings were slim at LegalTech NY other than matter management (See my post of Jan. 5, 2012: 11 matter management systems with booths at LegalTech.). (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)
Create SharePoint Checklists to Boost Firm Efficiency
Mark Gerow, Law Technology News
As with all businesses, law firms and legal departments need to pursue ever increasing efficiency and effectiveness, while delivering more and more complex services. One way to do so is through defining and applying repeatable processes to matters. Any candidate process management approach needs to encompass many decision points and possible outcomes. Further, it must be both acceptable and accessible to the legal professionals who will have primary responsibility for directing the work on any matter. (read the article)
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)
The typical longevity of a matter management system averages five to seven years
Rees Morrison, Law Department Management
Early in the data collection this year for the GC Metrics benchmark survey, 69 law departments stated how many years they had been using their matter management system. The average number of years those departments had had their system installed was 6.4 years. (read the post)
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)
