The role of the corporate legal department continues to evolve and shift beyond serving as a steward and guardian of the organization to increasing inclusion as a strategic business partner and catalyst and, quite often, a center for best practice excellence and innovation in legal service delivery.  Yet in a time of transformational change, where the legal department may have matured rapidly, there can often be a disconnect between the perception of value of the legal function within the broader organization and the reality. 

Consider these top 10 tips when reflecting on how you might build the brand and reputation of your law department. 

Top 10 Considerations

1. Start with a plan! Strategic planning will help you understand the delta between where you are now and where you want to be as a function. What is your purpose? What value will you deliver to the business? What do you need to do to get there? Think about the company’s top goals for the next 3-5 years and how the legal department will be positioned to support. Metrics are an important tool to help you drive the change you want to see as a function.
2. Build engagement with accountability. By establishing shared goals and objectives and identifying specific actions along with accountability measures, you will also foster team engagement through ownership and align your function with the broader organizational vision. If you want to take it a step further, you can align your functional goals and objectives against individual team members’ performance plans.
3. Don’t have metrics for the sake of metrics. The metrics you choose to report against should be aligned with what you are trying to accomplish as a law department (your strategic plan!) and as an organization. If it matters to the business, it should matter to the law department. For example, if your organization has a commitment to Diversity & Inclusion, you might begin to report against what the law department is doing to help drive this change — e.g., when working with external counsel, are you making hiring or staffing decisions about matters based on your firms’ commitment to D&I?
4. Basic framework for metrics. At its most basic level, you might choose to report on department fundamentals such as: work load (what type of requests are being handled by the department, and by whom - internal vs external resourcing; cycle time etc); results (legal outcomes/savings, and quality (both in-house and outside counsel performance)); and spend (internal and external as a percentage of revenue, spend to budget).
5. How easy are you to do business with? Many organizations are leveraging performance feedback from the business to demonstrate their value and moving towards the use of a Net Promoter Score (NPS) as a quantitative metric. This singular score by the business answers the question, “How likely are you to refer us to others?”
6. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Collecting data to support your KPIs can be a straightforward process with the appropriate systems in place or it can be a completely manual effort, which can distract an extraordinary amount of time and resources. Look at what data you have, consider your audience for the message and what you’re trying to communicate and prioritize in order to streamline the effort.
7. Track your progress. Whether you decide to report monthly or quarterly, you should demonstrate momentum against your objectives. The Association of Corporate Counsel also has great resources available to help you benchmark and compare your function against industry standards.
8. Boost your brand. If you are only reporting on your value to your leadership, you aren’t leveraging the full potential. To help pivot the perception of the law department from the “department of no” to a “the department of know”, law departments are looking at how they can begin to build their own brand withing the company. Managing and promoting your brand within your organization leads to alignment and efficiencies with key internal stakeholders and customers and mutes the skepticism or cynicism around the function’s value. It also has an important impact on internal team dynamics – rallying all members of the group around a unifying message, fostering engagement and inclusion while celebrating your success.
9. Telling your story. When thinking about your internal communications strategy, remember that stories, when told in a compelling and artful way, are a great way to build trust and reach your audience on a deeper and more meaningful level. Think about what the audience (internal business) really cares about and demonstrate by way of examples and stories how your team has contributed to the organization’s success. Be creative!
10. Unless you ask. As said by D. Casey Flaherty in this tremendous ACC resource, “...unless you ask [your law firms], you are almost guaranteed to get none of it.” If you align with your law firm(s) in this process, you are likely to get greater access to more complete data such as financial and matter information.