Metrics

It's a well-known fact that gathering and sorting through metrics is important for in-house legal departments. And know where else it's known? Every single other business unit, which are all fighting for limited data-gathering resources within an organization.

“It's no longer enough to say, 'What we do is really special,'” said JoAnne Wakeford, chief client officer of Nextlaw In-House Solutions. “You want to make sure your unique story is known. Reporting on that clearly and effectively is important.”

That means for today's legal departments that it's not only a matter of adopting metrics; it's making sure you demonstrate the value the metrics bring to the business.

The process of how to make that pitch was the basis of the “Boosting Your Team Brand: Leveraging the Power of Metrics to Deliver Value and Drive Engagement” panel at the 2019 ACC (Association of Corporate Counsel) Xchange conference in Minneapolis. Wakeford moderated a panel that included Judith Prime, senior adviser of client relationships at Dentons; Sowmyan Ranganathan, senior director of legal operations at AbbVie; and Richard Stewart, chief operating officer of BMO Financial Group's legal group.

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A Place for Spend

It's been a common refrain in recent years for corporate counsel: “Do more with less.” The first main application for metrics then, the panel said, is to tackle actually accomplishing that goal in a way that makes sense.

The metric that most legal departments are going to focus on, then, is spend. As Stewart noted, after all, “Bottom line, the best way to show value, in my view, is to show how you're lowering cost or spend. The priority is to drive that spend and show that we can be more efficient. On that point, law departments who hit their budgets will be seen as cost-efficient.”

Indeed, in a word cloud poll of corporate counsel in the room, spend was front and center of metrics priorities.

But with that said, spend is not the end-all-be-all of metrics. For example, if the rest of business becomes embroiled in litigation, “then your legal spend is going to go up. That's not a measure of how efficient your legal department is,” Stewart  said.

Ranganathan agreed, saying, “If you just talk about spend, you're going to tell an incomplete story … when it's not balanced by what the demand is.”

But even so, a focus on dollars and cents also can be a driver for change. “If we are being forced constantly to drive value and be more cost-efficient, then we should look at ourselves as a business,  Stewart said. “And perhaps there's an argument that we should be driving revenue ourselves and contribute to the business. … And second, if you're a business, you need to think about marketing and marketing strategy. You need to get yourself out there.”

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Marketing With Metrics

Indeed, the need to market oneself came through as an underrated reason to engage in metrics. Ranganathan explained that the ACC focuses on a few main drivers of metrics:

  • Creating visibility;
  • Gauging performance of organization;
  • Identifying opportunities to drive improvement;
  • Supporting goals; and
  • Supporting narratives with data.

Ranganathan noted that the last is the most important. “You really are then able to make your case more effectively. That's really marketing yourself.”

This means not only marketing within an organization but perhaps to law firm partners as well. Stewart noted that his department has used metrics to right-size the moderate risk profile they want firms to adopt. “We have to say to them, look as a bank, we have to take some risk, because without risk there's no reward. But you also don't want too much risk,” Stewart said.

For him, this means “that not every piece of advice needs to be gold-plated. You don't need a Rolls-Royce or a Cadillac every time you're asked for it.”

Still, with limited resources, it's important to pick and choose metrics that directly reflect outcomes, both for corporate legal departments and the law firms they work with.

“The businesspeople are living in a fog of uncertainty,” Stewart added. “They're working on 70% of the data they need, on a good day. It's unreasonable to expect our law firms to work with 100% certainty. It's a matter of getting that across to law firms.”

It's also a matter to determining the audience for the metrics, Prime explained. She said that so far at the conference,she has spoken with corporate counsel who primarily want to use metrics to help the general counsel look good to the board, but that's just one piece of the puzzle.

“If I'm in a legal-ops role, different data points are going to help me drive efficiency in the department. But if I'm talking to the CFO and trying to defend our budget for the year, I'm going to need different data points,” she explained.

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Telling the Story

So what does it look like when it's all put together? Stewart and Wakeford explained that BMO and Dentons Nextlaw partnered recently on a “Telling Our Story” initiative, which was designed to not only teach the legal department how to demonstrate value with data but also explain to the wider organization exactly what the legal department does.

“We want to be creative and collaborative, but our value perception within the bank was a bit muted, compared to the bank, and we were struggling with it,” Stewart said. “We had the story, we had the ammunition, but we just needed a bit of help.”

Stewart said that his team partnered with Dentons because they sell legal services and thus were able to understand exactly what BMO legal's value proposition should be. “The driver was really answering the question, 'What is it that you do?' You're being asked to validate the legal group on a continual basis. We had the answer, we had the story, but we had to put it across in a genuine way.”

The result was a video and short thought leadership pieces sent to the rest of the BMO business, focusing on the legal department's initiatives targeting vulnerable customers and pro bono legal aid programs. Stewart noted that “it doesn't have to be high-tech,” especially in smaller legal departments, but it can be a way to galvanize employees to proving what they do.

And, for those looking to implement a similar program in their own department, Stewart recommended, “Find what it is that's important for you as a legal group, then harness that in a way that works for you.”