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Legal value: Difference between revisions
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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. | 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 | 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 ineffable magic on its risk management, it certainly ''can'' count the ways it is prevented from doing so by quotidian distractions: the time spent box-ticking, form-filling, meeting-attending and re-advising the business on things it is, fundamentally, the business’s job already to know. 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, graphs and pie charts. | |||
But ''are'' they, in any organisation on the planet? | |||
Are they ''heck'', as the Americans say. | |||
{{sa}} | {{sa}} | ||
*[[Key non-performance indicator]] | *[[Key non-performance indicator]] | ||