The AI Metrics Discussion Every Legal Department Needs to Have
Legal departments everywhere are struggling with a fundamental disconnect. While vendors celebrate usage statistics and adoption rates, legal teams are asking a different question entirely: "What value are we actually getting?"
Our recent survey of 220+ legal leaders confirms this tension. A staggering 47% cited "misalignment between time spent and value delivered" as their top pain point with traditional law firms. Meanwhile, 70% want to scale from AI pilots to full transformation by next year. The gap between aspiration and reality comes down to measurement.
The Conversation
Rob Beard from Coherent published a thought-provoking piece arguing that the legal industry is having the wrong conversation about AI metrics. At Coherent, his team achieved a 78% reduction in contract review time, but Rob's point was that this was just the starting point.
His thesis: We need to look beyond efficiency metrics to understand true business transformation.
What He Argued
Rob outlines three categories of metrics that actually matter:
First, strategic reallocation metrics that track what teams do with recovered time. It's not enough to save hours. What strategic initiatives can your team now tackle?
Second, knowledge preservation metrics that quantify institutional memory captured and retained. Every departure takes knowledge with it. Are you measuring what you're preserving?
Third, business velocity metrics that measure how legal work accelerates broader company objectives. Speed matters, but only when it drives business outcomes.
His framework challenges the prevailing focus on usage statistics and adoption rates. These traditional SaaS metrics, while useful for vendors, often fail to capture what matters most to legal departments: tangible business impact and strategic value creation.
The Takeaway
The conversation crystallized around a new framework for measuring legal AI success:
• Stop measuring tool usage. Start measuring business outcomes.
• Stop counting documents processed. Start tracking deals accelerated.
• Stop celebrating features deployed. Start quantifying knowledge captured.
This shift in measurement philosophy represents a fundamental rethinking of how we evaluate legal technology success. The legal industry is at an inflection point. The tools exist. The capabilities are proven. But until we align on the right metrics, we're having the wrong conversation.
The question isn't whether AI can transform legal work. It's whether we're measuring that transformation in ways that matter.
Read more in our white-paper "Legal AI Value Creation Metrics":
