Having to deal with legal issues is no fun, but unfortunately, it may be inherent to your business. Working with a few litigated claims may be manageable, but what happens when there are too many to count?
We’ve been helping companies understand and manage their legal billing for decades and have seen major benefits of tracking legal metrics. If you’re looking to build your own legal metrics program or see if your current one is working for you, these are the most important data reports to look for. If you need help getting this setup, we would love to help.
- Attorney Rates
Now this may sound like a basic metric, but if you have hundreds of attorneys on hand, it can be difficult to keep track of who is charging what.
What To Do: Create a simple reference guide of all of your firms’ contact information, attorney name, designation, and rates. This can help cross-check information when legal bills show up on your desk.
How It Helps: If you’ve happily been working with a firm for a while, this guide can help you appropriately give raises to your most hard-working and effective attorneys. In addition, it can help you compare rates across different firms and determine a benchmark rate or range. - Averages per Jurisdiction
This legal metric will keep track of rates per jurisdiction, state, and region.
What To Do: Create a live document of average rates, average cost per case, and average duration. Make sure they are sortable by location, service hours, and service charges.
How It Helps: This information will provide you with better rate averages to forecast future costs and budgets and compare different rates per region and claim type. This metric is crucial for good financial planning. - Firm Performance
How are your firms doing? This all-encompassing report will help you understand more about time, cost, and overall efficiency of your firms. Remember, this metric is for reference. We recommend shifting focus towards your relationship with that firm and their effectiveness beyond the numbers.
What To Do: Compile information on cost, hours, files, averages, hours per designation, and active attorney counts.
How It Helps: This will give you an overarching view of a firm’s performance. Be sure to track this information quarterly or yearly. - Claim Snapshot
This one is our most popular report and it shows activity on each litigated claim.
What To Do: Compile information on the claim, claim totals, claim duration, legal cost, attorney hours, cost per hour, cost per bill, and hours/cost per attorney.
How It Helps: This drill-down report will show you a quick view of how each litigated claim is doing and compare it to other claims you have on file. Knowing these data points can help improve your current process.
If you have any questions about how to create or effectively track your legal metrics, please reach out to us at [email protected].
Nice write up!