Legal Operations

Metrics? What Metrics? KPIs That Legal Ops Professionals Need To Track (Part I)

In two parts, this week and next, we’ll explore what it means to define and measure legal project success.

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I’ve been working with people in legal operations for about 20 years now. Of course, most of my career has been on the law firm side, so I don’t claim to have an insider’s view of all the trappings of Fortune 500 legal departments. But I have experience as part of the legal team at outside counsel working with legal operations personnel. It’s not a stretch at all to gain understanding of how the relationship between inside and outside counsel works.

The truth is that some legal departments are more advanced than others. Whether it be technology, access to resources, or just the structure and budget of the department. At the end of the day, however, legal departments are pretty similar. I mean, the role of general counsel exists to provide legal advice and guidance to the business and its leaders and to help manage exposure to risk in general and legal liability in particular. Businesses need legal advisors who understand that business and they need legal operations personnel to support the mission.

The interesting thing to me has always been that what legal departments are missing is tons of legal talent, namely lawyers, to handle all of their legal work. Anyone who’s been paying attention over the past few years can deduce that more work is moving in-house. It’s an open question, I think, and I’m not sure an equal number of lawyers have moved in-house to handle the increased workload. So, where does this leave us?

In this situation, I see three options: First, corporations can hire more legal talent. Second, they can rely more heavily on lawyers at outside counsel. And third, they can simply do more with less. My sense is that, at least in the short term, many organizations will choose the third option, and this means there’s some work to be done.

I don’t remember who said it first, but there’s a well-known premise in operations that posits, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” In the project management circles in which I am known to roam, we use estimates, projections, and tons of post-project metrics to measure whether a project is on track and whether it’s actually achieved a successful outcome. It should be no different when managing a legal matter.

At the risk of oversimplifying the complexity of the work that goes into a legal matter, I have to say that almost all legal actions, cases, investigations, and even transactions, each involve a similar pattern of tasks, activities, and events each time a new matter arises. This is not to say that the work of lawyers is commoditized and simple; clearly, it’s not. It’s just an observation that anyone working in the legal business should recognize. And having made this observation, it is not unrealistic to make the leap from legal work to project management. My point: If you are leading a case, you are managing a project.

And if you’re managing a project properly, you’re benchmarking, you’re measuring, you’re budgeting, you have deadlines, and you’re concerned with the quality of the work. And if you’re doing this in-house, you’re also concerned about the business value of the work, ongoing operations, and validating the success of the project.

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Traditional project management metrics relating to scope, time, cost, and quality are important in defining the success of a project. More recent thinking has evolved suggesting that project success should also be measured by considering project objectives. Now, many stakeholders may disagree on what successful completion of a project looks like. It’s somewhat subjective and it’s going to be different for different organizations. That’s why it is critical to define success up front and clearly identify project objectives that are measurable.

At the outset of a matter, then, it makes sense to ask “What does success look like?” and “How will success be measured?” With these two simple questions, legal operations professionals can identify from the beginning what matters most to their organization, how the objectives align with the business, and the value of the outcome to business operations.

Next week, we will take a look at some of the metrics organizations should be measuring to determine the success of their legal projects.

Mike Quartararo

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Mike Quartararo is the managing director of eDPM Advisory Services, a consulting firm providing e-discovery, project management and legal technology advisory and training services to the legal industry. He is also the author of the 2016 book Project Management in Electronic Discovery. Mike has many years of experience delivering e-discovery, project management, and legal technology solutions to law firms and Fortune 500 corporations across the globe and is widely considered an expert on project management, e-discovery and legal matter management. You can reach him via email at mquartararo@edpmadvisory.com. Follow him on twitter @edpmadvisory.

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