Achieving Business Impact With Data: How Process Metrics Can Improve Your Legal Team’s Operations

In previous posts, we explained why data is critical to your legal operations strategy and how metrics can prove your team’s value. The main theme of those two posts? Metrics put you in the driver’s seat. They help orient your team in the right direction and take the guesswork out of long-term planning.

Your legal team’s time is valuable. When you prioritize work inconsistently, or based on a first-in-first-out model, you end up spending too much time on routine tasks (think form agreements and NDAs) and not enough time on the strategic legal work that matters most to your business. When you lack numbers to show leadership, it’s hard to make the case for more headcount, or to perform cost-benefit analysis on contractors.

It’s a theme we’ve heard time and time again from our customer-GCs across a range of industries. Most of them would like to be more data-driven, but their teams are already understaffed. How can they make time to collect and analyze metrics when there are always fires to put out?

Our Product team took this feedback and built it into our new Process Metrics Reporting tool. With Process Metrics Reporting, Ironclad users now have instant access to invaluable process metrics and analytics. They’re also able to generate and share these metrics with the click of a button. 

With Process Metrics Reporting, you can generate, view, and send an up-to-date report of your contracting metrics. The tool takes all the metrics tracked within Ironclad and turns them into an intuitive report that summarizes your team’s efficiency, sticking points, and output.

Process Metrics Reporting gives General Counsel full visibility into their team’s operations. It empowers legal operations professionals to answer process-related questions from leadership, other departments, and your own team. Each report includes metrics on the number of contracts completed, where workflows are blocking the most (e.g., awaiting signature, awaiting review by Finance), how long it takes to complete the average contract, and the breakdown of contracts by department and user–among other things. With this information in hand, you can streamline the way you execute contracts, allocate your time, and grow your team.

Here are a few examples of how you might use Process Metrics Reporting:

• The VP of Sales complains that Legal is a blocker, often leading to a slower sales cycle. The numbers from Process Metrics Reporting, however, show that the average processing time for a Sales-generated contract is already under 7 business days, and that usually the contract blocks on Sales, not Legal. Armed with this information, you can prove Legal’s value to your Sales team, and focus your efforts on training salespeople on Ironclad.
• You want to make the argument that Legal needs more headcount in order to keep pace with the growth of the business. Process Metrics Reporting shows you how many contracting workflows each new employee can be expected to generate and process, enabling you to report on your team’s capacity and project future bandwidth with confidence.
• Process Metrics Reporting shows that some groups at your company generate and complete workflows more efficiently than others. After reviewing the numbers, you decide to conduct refresher courses on Ironclad to make sure that lagging teams have the resources they need to make the most of Ironclad.

These examples are just the tip of the iceberg. There’s so much that you’ll be able to do with Process Metrics that we haven’t even begun to comprehend. We can’t wait to hear all the ways in which you use Process Metrics to empower your legal team.

Ironclad is an end-to-end contract management and workflow automation platform. By automating contracting processes and extracting intelligence from contracts, Ironclad lets legal teams focus on legal work, rather than paperwork. See Process Metrics in action today.