Getting Started with In-House Metrics
Gathering and analyzing data on legal workloads, efficiency, and spending can be challenging, but it’s essential for in-house legal teams that want to do more than put out daily fires.
Metrics are the gateway to strategy. They help legal departments make informed decisions, track progress to key goals, and demonstrate alignment with business priorities. Data-backed reporting also helps highlight the team’s contributions to the company.
Before launching a metrics program, legal leaders need to know what they’re trying to learn or improve. Without this clarity, a team can wind up tracking what’s easy to measure rather than what’s meaningful.
“There are a million different things we can track,” said Steph Corey, co-founder of UpLevel Ops and a recognized leader in legal operations. “Don’t track just for the sake of tracking. Ask yourself: What are you trying to look for to make decisions? What behavior are you trying to drive? That’s what you should track.”
So where should a legal team begin?
Building Visibility Into What the Legal Team Does
Corporate legal departments are under constant pressure to do more with less. The most successful teams have visibility into what’s happening within their own department. By tracking the right data, in-house professionals can begin to understand what work is coming in, whether it truly requires the legal team’s attention, and how internal and external resources are being used.
The resulting insights empower in-house teams to eliminate low-value tasks, provide effective self-service options, and focus their efforts on the matters that advance business priorities rather than getting in-house counsel and other professionals mired in routine (if urgent) matters.
Internal Metrics
To that end, leading teams will want to track the source, type and volume of legal work coming in, and whether it’s handled internally or outsourced. It’s good to supplement these measures with qualitative review through, for example, stakeholder satisfaction reviews or risk assessment.
Many also monitor overall legal spend and budget adherence, ideally by matter type or department.
These help to prioritize work more effectively, decide what should be outsourced, and justify adding headcount or investing in technology, among other benefits.
Law Firm Metrics
For teams aiming to bring more work in-house and reduce outside counsel spend, it’s useful to measure internal versus law firm spend, spend per law firm, and usage of alternative fee arrangements. Law firm staffing ratios help track the ratio of partner to associate billable hours. Matter cycle time measures resolution times with different firms. These reveal how efficiently law firms are staffing and delivering matters.
Tracking these metrics helps in-house leaders see which firms are delivering real value, where money might be slipping through the cracks, and where it might make more sense to bring work in-house or rethink how outside counsel is used.
Corey said she's increasingly seeing corporate law leaders pushing for value-based pricing. Clients want to know how their law firms are using AI and how they're passing the savings on to the organization. "You need data to negotiate the alternative fee agreements."
See a comprehensive list of key in-house metrics by UpLevel Ops.
Litigation Metrics
Litigation-related metrics are another big-ticket item to track. Longtime legal ops expert and Managing Director of Luna Legal Ops Juanita Luna said that keeping litigation costs in check and reducing risks is not just about tracking win/loss numbers or time to resolution. Legal professionals that are using data analytics and early case assessment have also started tracking “time to first insight.” This measures the amount of time it takes a legal team from the start of a legal matter to reach the first meaningful insight that can shape strategy or decision making. “Legal teams need to get their arms around the data to really delve into cost avoidance,” Luna said.
When used strategically, the insights from these measurements don’t just improve legal operations, they support better business decisions across the organization.
Don’t track just for the sake of tracking. What behavior are you trying to drive? That’s what you should track.
Focusing on the Desired Impact
Collecting numbers is not enough. Legal teams need to put together a storyline that will resonate with their target audience. The GC’s annual report for the board and company leadership, for example, will look different than the report to internal clients, such as HR.
Corey also advised that the metrics legal teams choose to track can shape how people act. For example, measuring cycle times without providing context — or accounting for varying levels of complexity — can create unnecessary anxiety and lead team members to feel they’re being evaluated unfairly.
Corey said teams should keep a couple things in mind about collecting data. “One is it’s not easy. Two is it drives behavior,” Corey said. “Be very thoughtful in what it is exactly that you want to track and think about the story that you're trying to tell, because when you’re reporting you’re using the numbers for different reasons.”
Harnessing In-House Talent and the Latest AI Tools
To put together an effective narrative, legal professionals need to pull information from multiple sources, analyze it, and format into digestible visuals with tools like Power BI or Tableau. This process requires significant effort.
In-house legal professionals need to rely on their resources in the company. “When I started out, Legal was so siloed,” she Luna. “By breaking through those silos, having a much deeper partnership with IT, with finance, and other departments, you get your resources however you can get them; You need to expand outside Legal.”
Relationships are just one part of the equation. Another is technology. In-house legal teams’ rapid investment in AI and analytics tools in recent years — including the use of simple, affordable solutions — makes it possible to achieve various goals even with flat budgets or limited headcount, she said. “There are plenty of tools and experts out there today to help you do more with less,” Luna said.
Corey is also increasingly seeing the use of client enablement tools, such as chatbots that answer questions that the in-house legal professionals no longer have to field. Teams can track and report on how many questions are resolved by AI, showing the value of these tools through the data they generate as they work. “People are a lot happier doing more meaningful work instead of cutting and pasting answers over into a Slack channel,” she said. “And you get AI data just from AI doing the work.”
AI is also getting increasingly good at analyzing raw data and providing useful insights. “It’s not perfect yet, but in my experience, AI can help us review client information and offer more meaningful recommendations — saving us from having to manually review all the data ourselves,” she said.
There are plenty of tools and experts out there today to help you do more with less.
Making Metrics Work for In-House Legal
Building a metrics program doesn’t require perfect data or a complex dashboard from day one. What legal teams need is clarity — about the problems they’re trying to solve, the behaviors they want to shape, and how their work drives business outcomes.
Data collection isn’t straightforward or easy. But with the growing availability of affordable technologies, including AI, and support from teams like finance and IT, legal leaders no longer need to go it alone.
By focusing on a meaningful set of metrics, legal teams can achieve more — no matter what their goals are.
Access "The Value of In-House Teams: Metrics for a Compelling Story" webinar on-demand today to hear Juanita Luna, Steph Corey, and Everlaw Strategic Discovery Advisor Chuck Kellner in conversation about best practices for tracking in-house legal metrics.
