Mostly undeveloped outside-counsel management. 'According to the Association of Corporate Counsel's 2020 Legal Operations Maturity Benchmarking Report, 40% of corporate legal departments classify the maturity of their external resource management strategy as "early stage". Fewer than 10% have integrated the associated metrics into a dashboard report made accessible to their general counsel.' One way to improve management of outside counsel is to rate their performance. 'For each matter managed on the Brightflag platform, designated matter leads can now rate the associated vendor(s) across five qualitative criteria: Communication, quality of advice, business alignment, budget adherence, and overall recommendation. Ratings are then instantly added to dashboard reports, where legal department leaders can compare vendors across one or more metrics as they weigh critical resourcing decisions.' The image comes from a related release by Brightflag. Click here for the full text from Brightflag.

Keep emails about contracts in one place. I hadn't heard about such mergers of email and the contracting process. The image gives a visualize sense of the result. 'Streamline collaboration during the contract creation process with the new Email Integration in LinkSquares Finalize. Now you can share contracts for review, receive redlines, track new versions and manage correspondences neatly in one place.' Click here for the full text from Linksquares.

An example of a contract-management dashboard. Dashboards are a long step beyond collecting and visualizing individual aspects of contract management. A good dashboard pulls together several quantifiable aspects and displays them in an intuitively insightful format. Here is an example from one vendor. Click here for the full text from Parley Pro's Olga Mack.

KPIs for panels of law firms. Among the many management decisions that panels of firms suggests, a basic consideration are how you track performance based on quantifiable data. This was not in the referenced item, but you can see it at the bottom. One vendor suggests a starter set. 'here are the top ten KPIs you can use and their application to a panel review activity. These are based on feedback from the experiences of our clients - and their inventive application of basic data-gathering to achieve the maximum value from the minimum effort:' Click here for the full text from Apperio and its link at the bottom .

Data on law departments and remote work. Based on polling questions during a webinar, an undisclosed number of participants provided feedback on their WFH arrangements. 'The majority of poll respondents (72%) work remotely every day, followed by 20% working some days in-office and some days remote, and 8% who go into the office every day.' Click here for the full text from barkergilmore's Taylor Powers.

PE industry data on legal spending. A narrow niche, private equity, but law department efforts apply broadly and generally, regardless of industry or sector. 'Apperio commissioned independent research of 160 legal leaders in US and UK PE [private equity] houses to examine their processes and attitudes towards legal spend management.' Click here for the full text from Apperio.