Benchmarking Legal Services (15 slides)
What best practices or service innovations have become more prevalent in the delivery of legal services in government?
Benchmarking template for the legal services function
The legal services benchmarking tool (15 slides in PowerPoint) provides a summary work plan and template to help compare the delivery and practices of the legal services function in government with those of other jurisdictions/ organizations.
The key benchmarking steps are:
- Identify potential organizations to participate in the benchmarking
- Prepare profiles of the benchmark organizations
- Compare delivery models and practices by dimension/criteria
- Summarize the results of the comparisons.
Dimensions/criteria specific to legal services are provided to help compare with legal services delivery models and practices of other jurisdictions (see preview chart).
Also included are examples of legal services common/best practices under each dimension as well as five level capability maturity descriptions to help situate your organization relative to common/best practices found in the benchmark organizations.
After you acquire the tool, you will receive an email with a link to download the template (15 slides) in a PowerPoint editable format as well as the Benchmarking Guide (8 pages) in a Word format.
Legal services common/best practices
Examples of common/best practices in the delivery of legal services include:
-
Centres of expertise for specialized legal services
-
Triage of new requests for legal services
-
Yearly legal services plan with client organization
-
Legal risk management
-
Team based delivery by lawyers and non-lawyers
-
Legal project management capability
-
Streamlined workflows and “lean” operations
-
Optimal legal workforce, including paralegals
-
Manage legal documentation electronically
-
Compartmentalization/ division of legal work (e.g., evidence review)
-
Use of technology for large-scale document search and data review
-
Automated production of legal documents
-
Knowledge sharing/ management
-
Orientation/training/mentoring legal services staff
-
Increased transparency of legal costs
-
Centralized document production centres.