Redefining In-House Counsel As a Driver of Value
better manage the department, have access to key metrics,
Ken Crutchfield, vice president and general manager of Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory U.S., talks about the shifting role of the legal department, the importance of tailoring your conversations to your audience, and how general counsel can use metrics and key performance indicators to help a company meet its business goals.
keep track of their risk, and to know what the corporation
CCBJ: The role of the legal department has expanded
The first thing is to base them on business objectives
significantly over the past 10 to 15 years. How do you and Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory support general counsel and other in-house legal professionals? Ken Crutchfield: We provide information solutions to in-house counsel to help them with a number of different challenges they may experience. We work across different domains and practice areas – everything from the cerebral questions about something within labor and employment or intellectual property, for example, to very practical information that allows general counsel to be able to make decisions about where to complete specific tasks. These are all available on our Cheetah for Corporate Counsel product platform. Those are some of the broad ways that we work, but increasingly we’re also looking at workflow solutions, challenging tasks like multijurisdictional surveys, and other information solutions that support better outcomes
has when it comes to all of that critical information. What are the metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) that general counsel should focus on? Well there is a lot to cover on KPIs.
and the company’s strategy. If a company is in growth mode, for example, it should have metrics and KPIs that are aligned with that goal. Here is another example. If a company is in a controversial industry and doesn’t want to have a high profile and doesn’t want to be in the news, the metrics, objectives, and policies should tie to litigation avoidance and early settlement to minimize publicity. From a business operations perspective, counsel can consider reducing cycle time on new sales contracts or time-to-completion around tasks. Reducing the number of exposures and risks that they have with suppliers is a great KPI to consider too. And we’re starting to see some corporate legal departments creating KPIs around internal client satisfaction as well, in terms of things like approachability and willingness to help and ability to manage stakeholders and things like that. It’s starting to go both ways, which is great.
for general counsel and the business. I will also say that I’ve noticed a tendency for organizations We also have a contract, matter, and entity management
to want to measure what is easy to measure. But oftentimes
software that supports small and midsize corporate legal
those metrics that are easy to measure don’t really have
departments called Legisway. It helps counsel to manage
much meaning or tie directly to corporate priorities
their contracts, their compliance matters, as well as their
(metrics that are easy to measure, but don’t tie to prior-
various entities, giving them a single source of truth when it
ities are referred to as “vanity metrics”). As a foundation,
comes to all of their corporate legal information. Legisway
companies really need to make sure that they’re measuring
allows general counsel to easily create reports that help
things that are important and not merely easy to measure. CORPORATE COUNSEL BUSINESS JOURNAL
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