Metrics

 

 

The article is part one of a two-part series.

It would seem like such a reasonable, simple thing for a general counsel to ask: “What legal work are we handling on behalf of the organization?”

Yet most general counsel cannot get a straightforward answer to this question. Why?

Departments utilizing electronic billing solutions can do a reasonably good job of centrally tracking legal work assigned to outside counsel, but the work that is handled in-house tends to be managed individually via email and informal notes. The volume of in-house work, ranging from straightforward requests for advice to complex business issues, is usually anecdotally significant, yet most legal departments cannot quantify either the volume or the value of that legal work. Compounding the problem, many lawyers are resistant to the idea that what they work on should be measured, in part because they assume this means they will be asked to track time. The result is that general counsels often have limited visibility into what people spend their time on, and they're making decisions based on incomplete sets of data—or perhaps they're not making decisions at all because they don't have the information that they need.

Many general counsels today are no longer willing to accept the status quo of only having anecdotal information about the work and value of their department. They are finding ways to collect, audit, track, organize and report on all the work that comes into the legal department. As with most change management initiatives, the key is thoughtfully establishing good processes and having technology in place to enable those processes. And it doesn't require asking lawyers to track time.

Defining a Process

To collect information about the work of the legal department, it is essential to utilize a work/matter management solution. As part of the implementation of such a solution, thoughtful consideration needs to be given to several key decision points:

1. What's a matter? Organizations need a consistent definition of what classifies a request for advice as a unit of work. Some legal departments aim to capture every request that comes to the legal department (if this is your goal, it is helpful to funnel all requests through a matter intake process). Others use hours as a baseline, e.g. if a request from the business requires more than three hours of effort to address, it should be captured as a legal matter. Still other departments use criteria such as the level of follow-up required, or the need to create a document to support the request, as the basis for determining that a request should be a matter. Regardless of your definition of a “matter,” what's critical is that the definition is clearly communicated, and the steps to create a matter within your matter management solution take very little time.

2. What are meaningful classifications of matters? Keep in mind that the objective is to have meaningful information available that answers important questions on behalf of the business such as:

  • What trends are we seeing in volume of legal work? Do we have the appropriate levels of staff and the right skill-sets in place?
  • Are there opportunities to more efficiently handle some types of legal requests?
  • Which business areas are generating the most legal requests?

To answer these questions, you'll need to set up the appropriate data fields in your work management solution. But be careful, don't over-orchestrate this process and require so many fields that the process of creating a matter becomes onerous. This is critical to managing the skeptics in the organization (discussed more in the next section). Common data elements that get captured include matter type and sub-types business unit, critical dates, geography, etc.

3. What makes a matter be of higher relative value to the organization? Additional questions that can be answered by collecting good data about legal work include:

  • Are lawyers working on challenging issues that make good use of their skill-sets?
  • Are we engaged in strategic initiatives to support the business?
  • How much of the work that we handle is very complex in nature?

To answer these questions, it will be important that lawyers assess matters in key categories. Examples include complexity, risk, strategic significance, impact to the business, etc. Keep in mind, that to create metrics and examine trends of relative value, values for these sorts of data fields should be numeric. Also, it is critical to establish guidelines related to selecting the values to promote consistent matter evaluation.

Managing the Skeptics

Even with the full support of general counsel to implement a matter management solution, there will be resistors in the organization who do not want to collect information about their legal work. Part of the change management effort is overcoming the perception that it is difficult to capture such information.

From my experience in implementing enterprise legal management systems for legal departments, there are three types of skeptics: the “we're exhausted” group, the “this is too much to ask” group, and the “how will the data reflect on me?” types.

“We're exhausted”—Most legal operations teams are managing critical initiatives one after another, if not concurrently. These initiatives can require significant time from lawyers in the organization to be successful. Therefore, it is not unreasonable to expect a response in the form of a groan from some lawyers who are being recruited to participate in a work management implementation (“yet another legal ops project”).

In order to bring these skeptics onto the team, communication about the project needs to make it clear that legal operations is working to integrate systems together to build efficiencies (each project is not siloed). Additionally, these resistors need to understand the benefits of matter management and how it might help them, e.g. data might point to trends in the business, help manage workloads, etc.

“This is too much to ask”—These skeptics are likely to believe that they are being asked to track time. That notion needs to quickly be dispelled, and a demo should be provided to these detractors of the speed with which a new matter can be created for a simple request for advice (this process should not take more than one minute).

“How will the data reflect on me”—These resistors are nervous about being measured. The emphasis when bringing these individuals to the table should be on the value of aggregate information. i.e. leadership needs to be able to use data to tell the story of the department to the business (where is new legal work coming from, what types of legal work are increasing, etc.). An objective of gathering data about matter relative value is to ensure that the department is working on meaningful legal work, not to track individual productivity levels.

Being prepared to face the tough questions that your skeptics will bring to the table is a challenging component of change management, but a very necessary step. In part two, I will discuss other essential change management elements of a successful matter management implementation.

 

Kris Satkunas is the Director of Strategic Consulting at LexisNexis CounselLink.