In-house lawyers can breathe a sigh of relief, as a new measure to track and compare attorney performance is focused on their law firm counterparts. The new “Relative Performance Measure” was announced by Thomson Reuters, and may soon be adopted by outside counsel looking to overcome sagging productivity. Simply, the number of hours worked and entered into billing systems is not the end of the story when it comes to evaluating the performance of law firm lawyers. By tuning proprietary calculations, Thomson Reuters believes it has come up with a more precise way to track lawyers over time. Will this lead to more “work martyrs” in Biglaw, who will have yet another metric to use to compete with their peers? Time will tell, but based on the methodology being utilized and the data being tracked, it does not appear likely that the new measure will be extended to the in-house world. While this may seem comforting, in-house counsel are already under the microscopes of their business and financial colleagues on a daily basis, and valuations of in-house attorney performance are often calculated objectively and subjectively in real-time.
“The Thomson Reuters Institute is introducing a new metric that measures how well lawyers are generating fees and collecting them by comparing them to their peers….The “relative performance measure,” abbreviated as RPM, can be used to measure a lawyer’s performance compared to other lawyers in the same segment, practice group, office location or lawyer title, according to an Aug. 14 press release. The relative performance measure can help law firms “diagnose and address the root causes of low-performing lawyers, such as poor collections, low billing rates or inefficient work processes,” the press release says. Baseball teams use a similar method to make relative comparisons, Law.com reports. In baseball, productivity is often measured by player performance as compared to a standard “replacement-level” player in the position, Marcus Belanger, an analyst at the Thomson Reuters Institute, told Law.com. “We thought: ‘What is the equivalent of that for lawyers? What could we do to level the playing field?’ Because [hours] is a fundamentally flawed metric, susceptible to macroeconomic factors and other things outside of an attorney’s control,” said Belanger, who co-wrote a report for the Thomson Reuters Institute (available here) on the new metric.”
Read: New metric inspired by baseball stats aims to measure real value of lawyers’ work at ABA Journal