If you can't quantify your legal team's value, you can't defend your budget or prove your impact. I've sat across from CFOs who view legal as purely a cost-center . I've watched General Counsel lose headcount because they couldn't articulate what they deliver. The difference between that outcome and a thriving legal department is visibility. It's metrics. It's knowing your KPIs.
At Xakia, I've worked with hundreds of in-house legal teams. The ones who measure their performance consistently outperform the ones who don't. Not because metrics are magical, but because they create the language to talk to your CFO, CEO, and board in terms they understand. This guide covers the KPIs that matter, how to track them, and how to present them in a way that moves the needle.
The KPIs that Matter
You don't need to measure everything. You need to measure what is most impactful to move your business forward. We've worked with teams of all sizes, and these six categories matter most.
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KPI Category
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What to Track
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Why It Matters
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Workload & Throughput
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Matters opened, closed, and in-progress per period. Average matter lifespan.
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Shows whether you're building dangerous backlogs. Exposes bottlenecks before they become crises.
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Turnaround Speed
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Days from request to approval (especially contracts). Variance across matter types.
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Business partners need consistency. If contract reviews take two weeks one time and six weeks the next, they'll start making risky decisions outside legal.
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External Counsel Spend
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Total outside counsel costs. Spend per matter type. Cost per FTE. Firm utilization rates.
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External counsel often becomes your largest expense. Without visibility, you won't know if you're overpaying, using inefficient firms, or missing opportunities to handle work in-house.
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Team Capacity
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Matters per FTE. Utilization rate. Headcount to business entity or revenue ratio.
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Overworked teams burn out. Underused teams can't justify budget. These metrics show whether you need to hire, outsource, or reorganize.
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Work Distribution
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Percentage of time by practice area (contracts, employment, IP, compliance). Trend analysis month-over-month.
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Reveals what your team spends time on. Often, firefighting consumes 40% of capacity, leaving strategic work perpetually sidelined.
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Contract Velocity
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Average days from submission to approval. Rejection rate and reasons. Template adoption rate. Negotiation cycles.
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Slow contract reviews kill business velocity. High rejection rates signal that templates need updating or your team isn't aligned with business expectations.
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You can't improve what you can't see. Start with these six. Once you're comfortable tracking them, add others like risk metrics or legal spend per business unit. Focus beats breadth.
How to Present Legal Metrics to the Board
Your CFO doesn't care that your average matter lifespan is 42 days. They care whether that's good or bad, and what it costs the company. Leadership speaks business, not legal. Translation is everything.
Instead of: 'Our contract review time is 4.2 days.' Try: 'We're closing contracts 30% faster than industry benchmark, enabling sales to move deals forward without delays.'
Instead of: 'We spent $800k on external counsel.' Try: 'We identified $150k in unnecessary spend and shifted work in-house, improving cost control and risk management.
Instead of: 'Our team utilization is 78%.' Try: 'At current capacity, we can safely handle 15% more matters without new hires. Beyond that, we need additional resources.'
Every metric should answer one of three questions: Are we managing cost? Are we managing risk? Are we moving the business forward? Lead with impact, not data.
Building a Legal Department Dashboard
You need a single source of truth. Not a quarterly report buried in email. A real-time dashboard that shows you where things stand, updated daily or weekly.
A good dashboard should show: matters opened, closed, and in-progress. Turnaround time trends. External spend versus budget. Team utilization. Top matter categories. KPI health status (green, yellow, red). That's it. Too many metrics kill clarity.
You have options for building one. Spreadsheets are free but brittle. Excel and Google Sheets work fine for small teams, but they're labor-intensive to maintain and error-prone as you scale. Data entry happens weeks after the fact. You lose signal.
Dedicated legal matter management software like Xakia includes built-in analytics dashboards. Your KPIs feed directly from real operational data. When a matter closes, your dashboard updates automatically. Xakia also includes AI-powered search, so you can ask questions in natural language ("what did we spend on employment matters last quarter?") and get answers without building custom reports. For small legal teams, this matters. It's the difference between having usable metrics and having metrics that are always out of date.
How Xakia Makes Legal Metrics Easy
The biggest barrier to tracking legal department KPIs isn't willingness. It's data. If your matters live in spreadsheets, email chains, and people's heads, you simply can't measure what you can't see.
That's why we built Xakia tocapture matter data automatically as your team works. Every new request, every status change, every completed matter feeds into your analytics dashboard without anyone having to fill in a report. Simple and powerful matter management software.
Our legal spend management module tracks outside counsel costs alongside internal workload, so you see the full picture of your department's resource allocation. No more guessing whether you're overspending with certain firms or whether that practice area is understaffed.
Small legal teams are 120% less likely to have access to legal technology. We built Xakia specifically for in-house teams, not law firms. The dashboards are designed around the metrics that matter to General Counsel and legal ops leaders. And because it's a per-user subscription, your team can adopt it in weeks, not months. Most clients are up and running in 2-4 weeks. No complex implementations. No consultants required.
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