Canadian Lawyer InHouse

lAW DEpARTMEnT MAnAgEMEnT DEMONSTRATING VALUE in-house are using benchmarking and scorecards to illustrate value to executive teams. By Jennifer Brown There's no debate in-house counsel add value to their organizations but these days some are demonstrating that value in carefully crafted graphs and spreadsheets benchmarking their accomplishments to show the c-suite. "The legal department is a bit of a black box in a lot of organizations," according to Louise Arsenault, director of legal services, global offerings with Accenture who was part of a panel at the Association of Corporate Counsel annual conference in Los Angeles in October. "But as each group in an organization at the end of the year has to ask for more budget or explain what we're doing, it really enhances credibility when you put numbers to what you are doing." Numbers can help a legal department not only show value and illustrate "wins" but can also explain other activities that may be viewed by certain 40 • business units as poor performance. "Everybody always talks about the two or three matters that are dragging but they never focus on the 45 you closed 'like that,'" said Arsenault. "That's what the metric did — it showed all the things we handled and the two glaring things we're still working on but it put things in perspective. Then you had all those deals you closed to help the business go forward. Instead of looking at it and seeing the big one represents what we are in the legal department." Arsenault is part of a global department of 400 lawyers. "For us benchmarking becomes an exercise of providing to leadership an overview of what we're doing, how we're managing risk, and establishing compliance programs. How we are doing our part to mitigate the risk inherent to our business, internal visibility, and accountability to my leadership becomes a bigger deal for a larger department," she said. Just like building a house, Arsenault points out you need to build a benchmarking program "step by step." "To benchmark you need metrics — some pre-existing data expressed in a useful format for measuring an objective," she said. "If your attorneys know it's being measured you will get more people entering data." Outside legal bills can be a source of data in addition to tracking d ec em b er 2013/january2014 INHOUSE what lawyers in-house are doing. In some instances that may mean tracking time with time sheets — something most inhouse lawyers happily abandon once they leave the law firm environment. In some cases though, using time sheets for even six months can be enough to establish some valuable data. For many years time sheets used to be the way legal services at Telus Communications Co. reported on its value to the organization, but two years ago they shifted to a method that more accurately reflected the value the team was delivering to the company. "We as a leadership team in legal decided if we wanted to showcase our value over and above just punching the clock we need to do it in a different way than reporting hours," says Andre Cyr, associate general counsel with Telus Legal Services. "Everyone in the organization works hard. That's not really speaking to the value of the organization." In-house departments should get away from the concept of reporting overhead and hours clocked says Cyr. "That works for external counsel because that's how they bill but if you want to get into benchmarking and provide a real report of what you're doing in the organization you have to get away from that and look at how our lawyers entrenched

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