A consortium of inhouse legal operations experts and consultants, including NetApp, PwC NewLaw in Australia and Elevate, have launched Legal Metrics Portal – a free resource to support ‘collaborative analysis and development’ in the inhouse world.
The portal is operated from LegalOps.com, and the ‘Is Inspired’ consultancy also helped with the project.
Sounds interesting, but what does it do? Basically it’s a place where inhouse experts can come and share ideas about what metrics they can use inhouse to benchmark a range of needs.
The portal already includes a catalogue of more than 500 legal metrics with detailed descriptions, organised in categories that span legal operations and several legal practice areas.
There is also a self-guided wizard that provides metrics recommendations based on what users seek to achieve, such as ‘data-driven decisions to be made or narratives to be told’, they explained.
The founders said that it has already taken plenty of work since October 2020 to get to this stage.
Jeff Franke, CEO of LegalOps.com, and who in the past worked inhouse at Yahoo, said: ‘We believe that by creating a comprehensive repository of in-house legal metrics knowledge and making it openly available to the community, we can fuel positive change in the legal ecosystem.’
PwC Australia NewLaw lead, Mick Sheehy, added: ‘As legal departments invest in technology, they have access to more data than ever. We want to help them use that data to drive better decision-making.’
Connie Brenton, VP of Law, Technology and Operations at NetApp, said: ‘For those of us who have spent years building metrics programs and defining best practices, this is a valuable opportunity to collaborate and share what we’ve learned to help move the entire community forward.’
And, Pratik Patel, Head of Innovation at Elevate, concluded: ‘It’s become critical for the legal world to connect fully with the business world, so we focused this resource on metrics that can be used to manage the in-house legal department and to communicate with the business it serves.’
The move makes a lot of sense and taps into the benefits of sharing knowledge across the industry. Moreover, you can’t really change in a lasting way what you don’t measure, so sharing metrics that everyone can use inhouse is a very helpful step.