Not all KPIs are equal: understanding the interacting role of KPIs through the use of a mapping sentence.

• Author: Hackett, Paul M.W.

How should we position ourselves to our potential clients to reflect our vision? How should we position ourselves to our stakeholders to succeed financially? What did we learn from our failures and how should we improve? During their daily operations, organizations from various industries face these and many other questions. Key performance indicators (KPIs) are ubiquitous 21st century management tools to measure various types of organizational performance within the company and its market position.

KPIs are applicable to all businesses, including the law firm and its marketing processes. To develop and implement a comprehensive combination of specific indicators relevant to your law firm, focus on your strategy. Senior law firm management needs data that shows whether the practice area or department spend resources that focus on the right priorities and generate value.

Daily monitoring of the results and processes that initiated them is critical. To maximize success, it is crucial to understand how the KPIs are interacting in the system. Is there a static structure that provides the background of successful operations or is it an ongoing interaction between those dashboard indicators?

The essential task KPIs perform adds value while demonstrating performance. They achieve this through the development of a four-dimensional understanding of business performance. Marketing functions of law firms utilize the same quadrants of the corporate framework as other industries: customer service, service levels, impact on clients and efficiency.

KPIs--A Set of Law Firm Values

KPIs for law firms should:

* be universal across industries--not just exclusive to legal services;

* be easy to control and allow benchmarking with other corporations, even those in other economic sectors; and

* feature strategically measurable values.

Keeping these criteria in mind, we took the eight KPIs suggested for the legal profession (1) divided into four key corporate components (that we will call facets) with subcomponents (that we call elements). These represent a definitive set of marketing metrics for the legal firm to consider. Let us illustrate how this balanced scorecard would look for law firm specific KPIs:

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Service Level

Accessibility: Relates to the ease with which customers are able to readily reach legal counsel at the time they have this need

Turnaround: Relates to the speed at which customers receive all forms of legal counsel

Teamwork and...