In-house counsel often pride themselves on being strategic business partners, yet many cannot answer basic questions about their own contract portfolio. What is the average turnaround time for a standard agreement? Which clauses generate the most redlines? How often do negotiated terms deviate from the company’s standard position?
Gary Miles, a 45-year legal veteran and coach to lawyers, says this lack of visibility is a serious gap. Speaking with me on “Notes to My Legal Self,” he emphasized that measuring the right key performance indicators is not just for law firm billing. It is an essential discipline for running any legal function like a business.
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“A lot of firms, not Biglaw but many others, just work and do not know how to run their business. They do not even know what a KPI is. They do not know what data to measure and track,” Miles explained. “I want to give them guidance about how to run their operations more successfully, knowing what to focus on and what is important.”
From Litigation Metrics To Contract Metrics
Litigators track case duration, win rates, and cost per matter. In-house commercial lawyers should be tracking contract cycle time, the frequency with which certain clauses are negotiated, the percentage of deals that deviate from standard templates, the time it takes to secure stakeholder approvals, and whether the company complies with obligations after signature. These metrics form a business health check for the contracting process, revealing patterns that no amount of anecdotal observation can match.
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Why KPIs Matter For Clarity And Usability
Companies that rely solely on qualitative assessments often overengineer contracts to guard against rare risks while ignoring common delays and recurring misunderstandings. Data shows where to focus. If a single indemnity clause is adding days to every negotiation, it is worth reassessing your fallback position. When you can quantify how often an issue slows down the deal, you can make an informed choice about whether the fight is worth it.
Platforms like TermScout make this practical by turning unstructured contract language into structured, comparable data. This enables benchmarking against the market, quantifying deviation rates, and targeting process improvements where they will have the greatest impact.
Getting Started With Contract KPIs
The most successful legal teams start small, focusing on a handful of meaningful metrics before expanding. They make the data visible to the team and to business stakeholders so that everyone understands the current situation. They use the numbers to diagnose problems, whether in intake, review staffing, or approval bottlenecks. And they adjust playbooks and fallback positions based on what the data reveals about real-world negotiation outcomes rather than relying on theory.
Gary’s core message applies equally to in-house counsel and private practice: when you measure the right things, you can manage and improve them. Contract KPIs are not about creating more reports. They are about empowering legal teams with clarity and confidence in their decision-making.
In an era where business partners expect legal to move at the speed of the deal, nothing builds credibility faster than being able to answer, with hard numbers, the question: How are we doing?
Olga V. Mack is the CEO of TermScout, an AI-powered contract certification platform that accelerates revenue and eliminates friction by certifying contracts as fair, balanced, and market-ready. A serial CEO and legal tech executive, she previously led a company through a successful acquisition by LexisNexis. Olga is also a Fellow at CodeX, The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, and the Generative AI Editor at law.MIT. She is a visionary executive reshaping how we law—how legal systems are built, experienced, and trusted. Olga teaches at Berkeley Law, lectures widely, and advises companies of all sizes, as well as boards and institutions. An award-winning general counsel turned builder, she also leads early-stage ventures including Virtual Gabby (Better Parenting Plan), Product Law Hub, ESI Flow, and Notes to My (Legal) Self, each rethinking the practice and business of law through technology, data, and human-centered design. She has authored The Rise of Product Lawyers, Legal Operations in the Age of AI and Data, Blockchain Value, and Get on Board, with Visual IQ for Lawyers (ABA) forthcoming. Olga is a 6x TEDx speaker and has been recognized as a Silicon Valley Woman of Influence and an ABA Woman in Legal Tech. Her work reimagines people’s relationship with law—making it more accessible, inclusive, data-driven, and aligned with how the world actually works. She is also the host of the Notes to My (Legal) Self podcast (streaming on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube), and her insights regularly appear in Forbes, Bloomberg Law, Newsweek, VentureBeat, ACC Docket, and Above the Law. She earned her B.A. and J.D. from UC Berkeley. Follow her on LinkedIn and X @olgavmack.