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May’s session of the Legalops Café was “The One About Data & Demonstrating Value”.
Special thanks to our guest speaker, Rozemie Defrancq, who is the founder of legal management consultancy, Level Up Legal for an informative presentation and discussion.
The Legalops Café is a growing community hosted by Tabled for legal operations professionals and inhouse counsel looking to network and share insights.
To receive updates and invitations to future LegalOps Cafe sessions please sign up here.
May’s session of the Legalops Café was “The One About Data & Demonstrating Value”.
Special thanks to our guest speaker, Rozemie Defrancq, who is the founder of legal management consultancy, Level Up Legal for an informative presentation and discussion.
A proactive focus on demonstrating value is crucial to dispel negative perceptions about legal teams being blockers or naysayers.
By showcasing alignment with your organisation’s goals, legal teams can be seen as positive, pragmatic and effective business partners.
Ensuring the wider organisation understands and appreciates the legal team’s value is also vital for gaining buy-in for investment and transformation projects.
I never question the value the legal team brings to a company or organisation. That’s probably because I’m a lawyer myself.
However, the rest of the organisation won’t always see all the ways you’re helping to drive positive outcomes and avoid the risk of negative ones.
Part of the solution is to ensure the team’s activities align with the company’s top goals and priorities and ensure you’re advertising this fact.
For instance, if your company is focused on revenue growth, then legal should focus on initiatives such as standardising documents, streamlining the contracting journey and enabling self-service.
If your company is scaling rapidly, and is worried about outgrowing its systems, that’s what you should focus on in legal as well.
If your company is looking to expand into new markets, then legal should work on facilitating that as best and fast they can.
Data enables legal teams to tell a more compelling story, emphasising their contributions to organisational priorities such as increasing revenue, achieving commercial targets, or improving efficiency.
Data is also helpful (if not vital) when seeking approval for new tools, helping to illustrate why the tool is required, what problem(s) it will solve and how this will benefit the business.
However, legal teams can find themselves facing a ‘data conundrum’ where they lack the data required to justify investing in tools and lack the tools necessary to acquire the data!
In this case, the best way forward is sometimes just to start with what you have.
There is always some data, e.g. financial data, HR data, benchmark data – you just have to get your hands on it, likely from various relevant sources and departments and aggregate them into one data set that makes sense to you.
You can then identify which elements of that data set are relevant to measure / track progress against to support a business case for getting your first tool in place.
Of course, this data gathering exercise can be quite an involved and time-consuming endeavour!
However, there is also a shortcut: implementing a ‘legal front door’.
A legal front door is a system that consolidates requests and simplifies intake through user-friendly digital forms.
After a few months of consistent recording and management of legal work, you’ll acquire insights into your workflows, enabling you to address bottlenecks, prioritise efficiency improvements, and present a more data-driven narrative of the legal team’s value to your organization.
However, it’s important to be cautious of opting for a ‘DIY’ legal front door using generic tools like JIRA or SharePoint.
Using tools not designed for legal work can result in a subpar system that fails to meet current needs or provide the necessary data to support the introduction of a more suitable tool in the future.
Consequently, you may find yourself trapped with an inadequate solution that lacks scalability, only fulfilling about 60% of your requirements.
Key performance indicators (KPIs) play a crucial role in measuring success and progress.
By capturing relevant data points and tracking improvement, legal teams can evaluate their impact, cost-effectiveness, and overall team health, while also benchmarking against industry peers and internal teams.
However, prior to thinking about concrete metrics, you need to identify the outcomes you want to achieve e.g. increasing stakeholder satisfaction, making workloads more manageable / better distributed, frictionless contracting…
And – as mentioned above – those outcomes should be aligned to the overall goals of the organisation you’re in.
The specific metrics to track and report on will vary depending on each company’s unique circumstances and goals.
However, these metrics can be broadly categorised into three buckets: i) impact metrics; ii) cost metrics; and iii) team metrics.
Impact metrics focus on measuring the legal team’s contribution to strategic objectives, such as risk reduction, regulatory guidance, contract metrics, and IP protection.
Cost metrics assess the cost-effectiveness of legal resources, including legal headcount, budgets, and outside counsel spend.
Team metrics monitor the team’s health, engagement, collaboration, and individual performance.
Here is a slide I shared with the group which sets out a handful of examples you might look at in each category:
Thanks again to Rozemie Defrancq of Level Up Legal for sharing her tips and insights with the group.
As technology vendors, we are very familiar with the ‘data condundrum’ Rozemie talked about in this session.
A lack of data – or data that is unstructured and/or fragmented across multiple silos – is a real challenge for in-house legal teams when seeking to understand and improve their workflows and articulate the value they provide.
As Rozemie points out, a legal front door can help in-house legal teams to capture and unlock legal data quickly and without burdening busy teams with manual admin.
You can read more about this in our related blog posts:
Introducing a Legal Front Door
Legal Ticketing: 6 tips for success
5 questions to help become a data-driven in-house legal team
If you’d like to learn more about the way Tabled could help your team to capture and unlock legal data while also maximising productivity please do get in touch.