This column describes opportunities for a general counsel to assemble a fuller picture of the in-house legal team’s productivity. No, it’s not lawyers tracking time. Let’s accept that lawyers vehemently oppose reporting their time on matters, even periodically or in units of hours. Without timesheets, where might a general counsel turn for data on what the law department has done or accomplished?
The lack of quantitative data can be solved, I submit, and with little imposition on staff. Many troves of data are available, lying around, unexploited, yet revelatory. I will briefly present several of them, outlining how they could feed into a composite description of activity and productivity, and tackling some of the objections to the arrival of this method in coming years.
