(Author) Legal Operations Administrator

Our team is looking to create a dashboard to track legal metrics of our small in-house team. We do not currently have anything that measures our team workload, accomplishments, spend, and data points / clauses for tracking negotiated Sales MSAs, etc. What does a dashboard such as this look like on your team? Looking for insight as to what measurable data points are typically captured in dashboards such as these. I appreciate any and all responses!

Legal Operations Responses: 

• We are currently implementing monday.com for our legal intake and projects dashboard- the intent is that it will capture everything our team works on that is outside of our transactional contracts (that data is all captured in our CLM). We chose monday.com since we already had an enterprise license to use it, so our employees could access their requests, etc.

• The metrics that we started with were

  • 1) Volume by contract type

  • 2) Turn around time. - If you can. This is usually limited to the turnaround time for the entire contract lifecycle. This is not super helpful because other stakeholders and the counterparty impact the speed at which contracts are reviewed and signed. I manually carve out signature time because we have little to no control over that.

  • 3) Number of canceled contracts - Which still takes legal time.

  • 4) Percentage within SLA by contract type.

• Most of our sales agreements are on Insertion Orders which are typically based on IAB terms, so not a whole lot of tracking going on there other than some of the business terms (e.g. n30/n60, term length, opt outs, exclusivity, etc.). For our larger clients that we do MSAs for (a very small percentage), there are some additional items, like the LoLs (caps, super caps), insurance requirements (additional insureds), data privacy (shared vs received, and what can and can't be used outside of the partnership), governing law, and clawback language are some that come to mind.
• Depends a bit on the business model but in general I track:
  • Effective Date
  • Termination Date
  • Termination for Convenience?
  • Auto-renewal?
  • If so, days to terminate prior to auto-renewal?
  • Counterparty
  • Spend (inbound or outbound)
  • Most-favored customer clause? (Y/N)
  • Restrictions on Business? (e.g., non-solicit, non-compete provisions)
  • Indemnification (Mutual, One-Way, None)
  • Limitation of Liability ($$ amount)
  • Carve-outs
  • Governing Law
  • Venue
  • Arbitration (Y/N)
  (These are based on the things my GCs have most frequently wanted instantaneous reporting on)
• As someone who's worked at Lex Machina and am now at PERSUIT (panel firm management platform) we actively use litigation analytics to help inform our clients on which firms have the most experience before a specific judge or against opposing counsel, (among other factors) which they then use to make a determination on the firms they plan to invite to participate on PERSUIT and competitively bid out the work under an alternative fee arrangement. The combination of the above ultimately allows the client to invite the most objectively qualified firms to compete for the work in a transparent way that often results in firm-driven reductions in price whenever the client utilizes the reverse-auction feature on the platform. I'm happy to talk through this use case more if you're interested.
• I track anything related to Force Majeure or Non-Standard Cancellation terms - I had to go back and fix review on these so much after COVID that I’ll never ignore them again.
• Here's a resource for those looking to get their feet wet in analytics for in-house teams, including:
  • Traditional business metrics
  • CLM data
  • Outside Counsel Stats

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