Legal value: Difference between revisions

[[Inhouse lawyer]]s collect no fees.

Legal practice management consultants may help law firms by running [[algorithm]]s comparing inputs to outputs and devise metrics predicting the ''optimal amount'' of literary lollygagging to maximise fee returns but an [[inhouse lawyer]]’s putative — granted, quixotic — quest is not to produce “legal work product”, nor even “timely, excellent, and great value-for money legal work product”, but to ''avoid'' generating [[attorney work product|legal work product]] wherever possible. In-house legal departments exist to ''throttle'' legal expense.

You can’t measure this with [[metric]]s of [[key performance indicators]]. Unavoidable legal process — things like customer [[contract negotiation]] — can certainly be streamlined, widgetised, productionised, but once that is done, it becomes an operational function, not a legal one, and [[legal]]’s contribution to its ongoing success, again can only be measured in ''silhouette'': how ''infrequently'' legal is obliged thereafter to get involved.

Hence, the best way of measuring inhouse legal value is also by its silhouette: just as a business cannot count the ways that its [[inhouse lawyer]]s sprinkle their magic on its forward health and viability, it certainly ''can'' count the ways they is prevented from doing so by quotidian distractions: the time they spend box-ticking, form-filling, meeting-attending and re-advising the business on things it is, fundamentally, the business’s job to know already.  

These “[[key non-performance indicator|key ''non''-performance indicators]]” could easily be counted and presented to the [[Opco]] on an attractive [[slide]], replete with [[RAG status]]es, with downward-sloping graphs charting legal’s ascent to untrammelled, crystalline excellence in the weekly stakeholder check in conference call.