(Courtesy photo)

In the not too distant future, metrics will likely become a pivotal part of law firms' relationships with their corporate clients, and vice versa. But for now, much of the information gleaned from outside counsel evaluations is limited, ad hoc, and for the most part, largely unseen by those it would help the most. Thankfully, "now" never lasts too long.

In a bid to kickstart legal metrics' maturity, Winston & Strawn is spearheading a project that brings together legal stakeholders from across the industry to develop new metrics dashboards and benchmarks.

Winston's chief information officer Dave Cunningham, who is leading the project, said it includes a consortium of 17 law firms and five corporate legal departments collaboratively designing 15 metrics dashboards, though the amount of participants and dashboards is likely to increase. Those currently active in the effort include representatives from law firms Mayer Brown, King & Spalding, Dentons US, Paul Hastings, and Wilson Sonsini as well as legal ops professionals from Google, Adobe, Oracle and Microsoft, among others.

Beyond law firms and legal departments, the project also includes legal services companies LawVision and Elevate, industry organization Diversity Lab and legal tech provider Paladin, and Cunningham noted that "all are welcome" in the consortium including ALSPs and the Big 4. A list of other participants can be found on the project's website.

The metrics being developed by project stakeholders, which can be used by both law firms and legal departments and potentially shared across the client-firm divide, focus on non-financial data, with an early emphasis on diversity. Other measurements include pro bono engagement, post-matter and net promoter score feedback, and legal operation measurements such as budget accuracy, billing time, and time to matter completion.

The metrics dashboards, and the software that powers them, are a still a work in progress. Cunningham said the consortium intends to highlight its first working dashboards by the end of February at a LawVision-hosted roundtable event of legal-ops professionals in Philadelphia.

He added that the consortium is working to "have the system fully operational before the CLOC 2020 Institute" in May to present to the broader legal-ops industry.

Per Cunningham, the goal of the project is to provide law firms with real time visibility into metrics that influence their clients' legal buying decisions, allow them to compare themselves against existing industry benchmarks and give them a more automated way of creating metrics in the first place.

For legal departments, the project also represents an opportunity to share "metrics and benchmarks with their law firms where they wish to do so and, optionally, receive desired metrics from their law firms" should they so choose, he added.

To be sure, metrics dashboards focusing on outside counsel performance are becoming increasing commonplace in legal offices, whether created by legal teams themselves or offered by technology and legal services providers like Wolters Kluwer, Qualmet and HBR Consulting, among many others.

But this new effort looks to stand out with its emphasis on less common metrics, such as diversity, which Cunningham believes is sorely needed in an industry where he sees most metrics exclusively focus on financial data like rates, discounts and e-billing accuracy. By providing real-time measurements as well, the project is also aiming to change how and when legal teams deliver and consider these unique evaluations.

Cunningham believes the new dashboards will give law firms a better sense of how they're performing in key areas flagged by their client, in no small part because "emailing a PDF once a year isn't really the same as live dashboards you're looking at all the time," he explained.

Since the project is still getting off the ground, Cunningham declined to discuss the data extraction and analysis software the consortium will use to power its metrics dashboards in real time. But he noted that the process is similar to an accounting system that "calculates profitability by looking at accounting information—[our] system would analyze the HR and financial data to calculate the diversity and other legal-ops metrics."

He stressed, however, that the dashboards won't contain personally identifiable information, and there is no "risk for exposing individual information to clients or across the firm."

To give those in consortium more options and scale up the project faster, there will also be a way for participants to provide their metrics manually outside of the automatic system.

While the project looks to break new ground, it won't immediately address one of the most pressing issues facing legal metrics: standardization of benchmarks. Cunningham noted that the project's initial focus is on "automating and visualizing whatever the law firms or legal departments feel are important to them and we're doing it in their terms. Just in the area of diversity, we are tracking 17 different industry metrics, plus many legal departments have their own unique published and unpublished metrics."

But in the future, he expects the consortium to "to agree a set of standardized metrics and the rules that define them. The intention isn't to force compliance, but rather to provide some ease and synergy."