Legal Data Analytics
End-of-Year Legal Department Reporting
Top three reasons why a Legal Department should run end-of-year reports.
Your Legal Department is generating end-of-year reports - great! - but what should they include?
Introspection for its own sake is rarely useful, and the same is true for a Legal Department reflecting on its year. Once you have a clear understanding of WHY you should run end-of-year reports you can turn to WHAT to include in those reports.
End-of-year Legal Department reports need not run the length of a short novel - you simply need sufficient information to know where you stand today, help you spot key trends and assist with stakeholder engagement. To achieve these goals, your reports should include:
- Annual performance overview
- Spend overview
- Key trends analysis
- Resource utilization
To run end-of-year Legal Department reports with ease, you will also need to:
- gather your data from your matter management system (like Xakia) or excel spreadsheets
- establish key performance indicators against which you can measure performance
- visualize your legal data
Side note: If you are new to legal data analytics, you might like to download our white paper In-House Legal Data Analytics for Beginners.
Annual performance overview
Your report should include a section that lays out a clear, simple overview of your performance - both standalone and against KPIs. This includes current and previous year(s) performance metrics:
- Volume of work received and completed
- Volume of work received and completed by work type
- Volume of work received and completed by business unit
- Proportion and type of work resourced internally / externally / automated
- Average turnaround time or time to resolution
- Average time to assignment for new requests
- Quadrant, including proportion of work with a strategic focus
This is not the place for post-mortems, but it is important to call out major projects, legal operations initiatives or resourcing (new or needed) that may have impacted or improved performance.
Spend overview
External spend typically accounts for 40-60% of a Legal Department budget, so its performance against expectations can make a material difference to performance. Singling it out as a key metric that warrants its own reporting is critical to a comprehensive end-of-year Legal Department report that focuses legal leadership minds on maximizing resources available.
For this report, your data might come from your matter management software (like Xakia), your Finance Department or your spreadsheets.
A spend overview should include:
- Total spend
- Total spend by matter types
- Total spend by business unit
- Spend per firm, including highest paid firm(s) broken down by category and other metrics
- Spend on major projects
With an eye on ensuring that you extract the highest return on your limited budget, one of your most important outputs of this report is to understand your work profile and make a business case for:
- work that can be more effectively insourced
- work that can be more effectively outsourced
Key trends analysis
Spotting trends in your legal data is one of the key reasons to run end-of-year Legal Department reports, so answering these questions is essential: How did your legal work, resolution or resourcing change:
- over the course of the year?
- from previous years?
At a minimum, this section breaks down your work into months or quarters to visualize the volume of work being done by:
- category of work
- business units
A deeper trend analysis will sprinkle data visualizations with commentary about major seasonal, structural or company specific changes that have impacted your work.
As output, your goal is to understand how the work profile is changing and adapt your resourcing structure to match those changes, whether that includes recruiting to match an increase in litigation, or introduce automation to address high volume / low value requests from a particular business unit.
Resource utilization
Legal budgets are not limitless! This section of your report addresses a constant question for legal leadership: how do I maximize the resources available to me? End-of-year reporting is your opportunity to look at this holistically and to track progress on addressing gaps or moving work to its more appropriate and effective resourcing solution.
This report should include:
- Total volume of work by resourcing solution
- Work types by resourcing solution
- Turnaround times by resourcing solution
- Quadrant (legal complexity and strategic impact) by resourcing solution
- Quadrant by work type AND resourcing solution
Your quadrant is an opportunity to identify latent team potential and move it to more strategic work, or to identify where external resources are receiving engagements inappropriate to their cost profile - this is precisely the sort of actionable insight you want to achieve from your end-of-year reports!
Download: End-of-year Legal Department Reporting
For a full outline of end-of-year Legal Department reporting, including examples of reports for each of the sections listed above, download our white paper here.
