Most functions in a company are measured. Sales has conversion rates, operations has cycle times, finance tracks variance against budget. Legal is often the exception: judged by anecdote, invoice size and the general feeling that things went fine. That is not because legal work cannot be measured. It is because the traditional unit of account — the hour — measures the provider's effort, not the buyer's outcome. Four numbers do the job better.

Turnaround time

The clock starts when the business asks and stops when a usable answer arrives — not when the lawyer opens the file, and not when a memo goes out that triggers three rounds of clarifying questions. Alongside the average, look at the distribution: deals are not lost on the typical case, they are lost on the outlier. A contract review that usually takes two days but occasionally takes three weeks is, for a sales team, a three-week process — people plan around the worst case they have seen.

Turnaround is also the number the rest of the company feels most directly. It determines whether legal is experienced as part of the deal or as an obstacle to it.

Predictability of cost

This number is not about being cheap. It measures the gap between what was said at the start and the invoice at the end. A predictable legal function can be budgeted, and its cost can be priced into deals. An unpredictable one trains the business to stop asking — and the questions never asked are the largest hidden cost of any legal function.

Predictability is mostly a property of process, not of goodwill. Work that follows a defined path can be priced before it starts; work that is improvised each time cannot. The test is simple: over the past year, how often did the final invoice materially exceed the estimate — and did anyone call to warn you before it did?

Rework rate and outcome quality

The rework rate: how often does a deliverable come back because it answered the wrong question, missed the brief, or was unusable by its recipient outside the legal department? It is a cheap proxy for process quality — high rework almost always means the matter was poorly framed at intake, not that the lawyer was careless at the end.

Outcome quality is the hardest number and the most important one. Did the contract hold when it was tested? Did the position taken survive the dispute? Were the risks flagged the ones that actually materialised? This can only be judged in hindsight, which is why almost nobody tracks it. A periodic look back at the documents that events have since tested tells you more than any satisfaction survey.

Why hours billed measure none of them

An hour count says nothing about speed — a slow process bills more. Nothing about predictability — the hour is open-ended by construction. Nothing about rework — work done twice is billed twice. And nothing about outcomes. Worse, the incentive points the wrong way: efficiency reduces revenue.

This is not an accusation that hourly billing is dishonest. It is the sober observation that it is uninformative: it measures input as if it were output. A large number of hours is compatible with excellent work, with mediocre work, and with excellent work done inefficiently — and the invoice will not tell you which you received.

What to ask a provider to report

Ask for reporting along the four numbers:

  • typical and worst-case turnaround per type of work;
  • quoted cost against final cost, matter by matter;
  • how often work was corrected or redone after delivery;
  • for review work: what was covered, and where each finding comes from.

None of this requires a dashboard project. A shared record updated a few times a year is enough to start — what matters is that the numbers exist, that both sides look at them, and that the conversation about legal work shifts from anecdotes to evidence.

A provider with a structured process can produce these numbers without heroics — they fall out as a by-product. A provider who cannot is telling you, in the politest possible way, how the work is organised. We report against these numbers because our way of working generates them on its own: systems do the structured reading, and a named lawyer supplies the judgment and answers for the result. If you want to know what your legal spend is buying, these four numbers are the place to start.