KPIs, Benchmarking and Communication Plans... for legal teams?

Being treated differently is a common problem for in-house legal teams – or worse being labelled the ‘work blocking’ department.

Understanding the business, talking their language and using their reporting processes integrates a legal team into the organisation. This ensures the legal team is fully appreciated on terms the business understands. See our previous article ‘Five ways top General Counsel show the C-Suite their value’ for more on that. But the next step is much bolder...

KPIs, benchmarking and communications plans are three ways for General Counsel to cement the in-house legal team deeply in the business.

Let’s talk about each of them.

Key Performance Indicators
Legal services are special, but they can and should be measured like everything else, and measuring legal services provides a goldmine of useful information. Many organisations don’t know enough about what they spend on the law or even what their critical legal issues are. KPIs shine a light on the legal profile of the organisation. For example, you may uncover significant legal spending on employment cases easily avoidable with a simple HR process change. This information empowers a General Counsel to allocate their budget in the most effective and impactful ways.

Good legal KPIs communicate, highlight, and celebrate the contribution of lawyers, especially in-house lawyers. They demonstrate success but also show your openness to continuous improvement. If your work has never been measured in this way it can feel vulnerable, but proactively discussing how to measure what you do with the CFO or CEO is a powerful move. When KPIs properly align with the legal strategy and the strategy of the business it gives the team a clear unifying purpose, demonstrating to everyone, what the legal team does, why it does it and how.

Benchmarking

 Done well, benchmarking is another powerful tool.  Where KPIs measure the performance of the legal team to best show their strengths; benchmarking allows the in-house team to check their performance against external measures. This shows the team where and how to develop and improve. It demonstrates (again) an openness and willingness to learn which will impress the board and get them in your corner.

Benchmarking lives or dies on using the right comparators, choosing the right measures and being clear about what is being done and why. Lawyers naturally feel resistant to the process; no-one enjoys being compared to someone else. So how it is done really matters.

Be explicit on what is being done, why, by whom, how and what is being done with the results. Give the legal team a reason to trust that the outcome of the exercise will be good for them as individuals and as a team. Because like KPIs, this ultimately improves the reputation of the legal team and demonstrates its value.

Communications Plans

Legal teams do great work, but if no one knows about it, that isn’t enough. A communications plan is the General Counsel’s way of making success visible at every level in the organisation. Ensuring the business sees all the good things, not just the well-known crisis work.

A legal comms plan creates a framework for building professional relationships across the business. It gives the legal team (and individual lawyers) a profile in the organisation – marketing them to the wider business and the C-suite. A visible GC is great, but even better if every lawyer is known to the business.

GCs should schedule regular meetings with core client business leaders and C-suite. Ask their views, ask what’s worrying and impressing them, and tell them what the team is doing.  Get the rest of the team doing the same with their contacts. Even a simple weekly email gives the C-suite something they won’t get from any external law firm and keeps legal front and centre in their thinking.

Putting it all together

Being measured by the tools of business is daunting for any lawyer. But if you can embrace it, you will enjoy more trust; building a respected legal team that works as a seamless part of the business. It is well worth a little discomfort.