Please enjoy this blog coauthroed by Marcelo Cardoso, Supervisor de Legal Intelligence, Mercado Livre Inc and Professor Mori Kabiri, Founder and CEO, InfiniGlobe.
Legal Analytics shining in Brazil
Data and performance analysis in legal departments is no longer a nice-to-have, it's a necessity. The advancement of digital transformation and the growing demand for efficiency have positioned legal teams in a new role: that of a strategic business partner. To fulfill this role, the legal department must be aligned with other areas of the company and be able to clearly and objectively communicate the impact of its actions to stakeholders unfamiliar with legal language.
In this context, the adoption of indicators and KPIs becomes essential. They allow teams to measure performance, identify bottlenecks, anticipate risks, and, most importantly, make decisions based on data and evidence. However, this kind of analytical approach is rarely addressed in traditional legal education. That’s why more and more legal professionals are seeking to develop analytical skills. And that’s because understanding and applying legal metrics is no longer a differentiator; it’s what ensures relevance and real impact in the corporate environment.
Why Multidisciplinary Matters Now
The topic of multidisciplinary skills comes up often these days, but why is it especially critical in legal departments right now?
Let's rewind a bit. Just a couple of decades ago, legal departments mainly operated in isolation. Lawyers provided advice, managed risks, and tackled problems as they emerged. The legal department was often seen as the department of "No"; slow, conservative, and reactive. Compliance, risk management, and protection dominated the agenda, leaving little room for performance measurement.
Then something shifted. The rapid pace of business, globalization, and technological advancements placed significant pressure on legal departments to evolve from traditional cost centers into strategic business units. Suddenly, in-house counsel, originally trained solely in law, were asked to forecast budgets, cut costs, and manage complex legal projects. General counsels found themselves in board meetings, asked to present balanced scorecards and KPIs alongside other C-level executives.
This transformation sparked the rise of Legal Operations. Initially small teams figuring out how to support attorneys quickly evolved into a sophisticated discipline. Organizations like CLOC (the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium) shaped this evolution by clearly defining 12 core competencies necessary for legal teams to thrive. These competencies include tech management, process improvement, vendor management, and financial stewardship, among others.
Legal expertise alone isn't enough to transform a department from a cost center into a business unit, additional skills are essential. While legal operations teams have filled some of the gaps, the need for a multidisciplinary approach has become increasingly clear. In-house counsel who are fluent in both business and technology often rise into leadership roles. They understand that skills in data analytics, project management, and the effective use of KPIs are critical to running legal like a business.
Why KPIs? They're no longer tools reserved for marketing or HR. Today, they're essential for legal teams to measure, demonstrate, and elevate their value. Businesses expect insights backed by solid data, whether it's litigation spend, contract cycle times, or vendor performance. Decisions without data are increasingly seen as incomplete. That’s why many teams turn to shared frameworks like those outlined in the Legal Operations KPIs book and continue the conversation in the Legal Ops KPIs Forum in Brazil and other countries. A place for legal professionals to learn from the experts, test ideas, benchmark, and exchange practical lessons from the field.
Legal teams embracing a multidisciplinary mindset today will become tomorrow’s strategic business partners, valued not only for their legal advice but also for their measurable, data-driven impact.
Four Pillars of a Modern Legal Department
Data & Analytics
Today, data isn't just an asset, it's essential. Legal teams historically relied on intuition for making business and management decisions. While these remain valuable, they're no longer enough to meet the demands of fast-moving, complex businesses. That's where legal analytics steps in.
Legal analytics involves collecting, analyzing, and visualizing data to uncover insights, manage risks, and guide decisions. Think litigation patterns, average settlement values, or next year’s budget forecast. This goes beyond spreadsheets or basic reporting. It's about translating data into actionable strategies.
For example, predicting litigation outcomes based on case and similar historical data can significantly enhance risk management, cost predictability, and resource allocation. When these insights reach the boardroom, they strengthen Legal’s credibility and strategic value.
But here's the catch: effective analytics require multidisciplinary collaboration. Lawyers must partner and build a bridge between the leadership and c-levels expectations from legal department, with legal ops, data scientists, analysts, and IT specialists. Building this bridge ensures correct KPIs are being implemented, measured and tracked so they can align their efforts toward the business objectives.
Quick-Win Checklist:
● Identify three critical KPIs aligned with your business objectives.
● Implement a simple dashboard to track these metrics.
● Conduct monthly reviews to translate data insights into actionable plans.
Process/Project Management
Process and project management in the legal field has become essential to increase efficiency, predictability, and control over daily operations. Based on frameworks like Legal Project Management (LPM), it enables teams to structure workflows with clear goals, defined timelines, and consistent delivery tracking. Beyond adding value to the business, this approach offers a concrete opportunity for lawyers seeking new professional paths. By specializing in areas such as management, innovation, technology, or data analytics, legal professionals can broaden their scope beyond traditional practice. This shift is especially relevant for those feeling disenchanted with the legal profession, as it opens doors to strategic roles within organizations. More than modernization, it is a strategic evolution that strengthens the legal department's relevance and integration with business goals. Well-mapped processes also ensure greater knowledge management and continuity, reducing risk in fast-paced or high-turnover teams. Applying structured management to legal work is a key step in transforming legal departments into resilient and value-driven business partners.
Automation (AI)
Automation isn't about replacing lawyers, it's about empowering them. AI-powered tools and robotic process automation (RPA) remove repetitive, low-value tasks, freeing legal professionals to focus on strategic, high-impact work.
Consider routine tasks like filling out forms, NDA reviews, or managing compliance checklists. These repetitive processes consume significant resources and time but add little strategic value. With automation, these tasks can be handled faster, consistently, and accurately, significantly boosting productivity.
Effective automation, however, requires a clear multidisciplinary approach. Legal experts need a solid understanding of AI and generative AI (GenAI), information privacy, result accuracy, and ensuring the human factor remains involved to maintain quality. Successful automation projects always begin with a clear understanding of business processes and end-user needs.
Quick-Win Checklist:
● Identify repetitive, time-consuming processes ideal for automation.
● Start small: automate one high-frequency task to build internal trust.
● Safeguarding information privacy and accuracy rigorously to prevent AI-related errors and hallucinations.
UX & Legal Design
Digital transformation in the legal field doesn't rely solely on automation, charts, and sophisticated dashboards — it also depends on how information is perceived, presented, and used. UX (User Experience) and Legal Design play a crucial role in this process: they make the complex accessible, the technical understandable, and legal content functional for non-lawyers.
Throughout my journey in data and legal operations, I’ve seen that many of the frictions between legal and business areas stem not from the content itself, but from how information is delivered. Dense reports, unintuitive language, and rigid formats often hinder strategic decision-making. Legal Design brings empathy and visual structure to the table, enabling us to deliver the same legal content with a user-centered approach. This allows business teams to interpret risks, impacts, and alternatives with clarity.
I’ve applied these principles across indicator dashboards, workflow designs, and even internal communications. The combination of data, storytelling, and legal design creates experiences that strengthen the relationship between legal and business.
UX and Legal Design aren’t about aesthetics — they’re about strategy. They are tools that help legal teams take on a more consultative, proactive, and integrated role within the organization.
Building the Team
There are steps that one can take to form a multi-disciplinary legal team.
Skills audit of your existing team is one of the first steps. We’ll identify strengths and gaps, specifically focused on project management, data analytics and automation technologies. Identify the talent that you already have and assess the potential gaps where further training or hiring is required.
A valuable resource is collaboration with universities. A partnership with academic institutions can provide access to a pool of fresh talent through internship programs, guest lectures, or research projects. By introducing new skills into your department, you can keep your area of expertise in line with what is being taught in academic institutions.
Creating pilot squads is another effective approach. The small team is a cross functional team that can test a new project or a new intervention. Through these teams, you can test ideas, refine processes, and showcase value to the wider organization.
Ultimately, remember to hire outside experts for specific training and workshops. Trainers in technology, process optimizations and KPIs can provide hands-on training to your team to enable them to ramp-up skills quickly.
Quick-Win Checklist:
● Perform a skills audit inside your organization.
● Settle for at least one university partnership.
● Create a test group to experiment with multidisciplinary projects.
● Get industry experts for trainings, workshops to share best practices
Case Study
A new initiative was to bring the legal sector closer to a data-driven mindset. The goal was to teach in-house counsel and legal analysts to behave more strategically and use data to underpin decision-making and communication with other functions.
The training was progressive in nature starting from understanding data and basic metrics to SQL queries to building a dashboard on BigQuery and Looker Studio. The use of real business scenarios in each module ensured application.
The project aimed to create a cultural change in addition to technical skills. The participants started to look more critically at contracts and identify operational bottlenecks and provide evidence for proposals. Their capacity to translate legal information into actionable insight impacted positively the collaboration of the departments with finance, procurement, and operations.
The project showed that it is possible to create data-driven legal teams and is crucial to do so. It makes the legal department’s role stronger, more credible, and better able to measure impact on business.
Conclusion
The legal department of the future will be judged by business impact, not courtroom victories. Legal expertise alone isn't enough to transform a department from a cost center into a business unit, additional skills are essential. While legal operations teams have filled some of the gaps, the need for a multidisciplinary approach has become increasingly clear. In-house counsel who are fluent in both business and technology often rise into leadership roles.
A modern legal department earns its credibility by turning insight into business value. The path we’ve mapped here is straightforward, if not always easy:
● Apply project‑process discipline so work is predictable and repeatable.
● Deploy targeted automation to lift low‑value tasks and raise quality.
● Use UX and legal‑design principles to present information everyone can act on.
● Grow talent deliberately, skills audits, university partnerships, pilot squads, and expert coaching.
● And last but not the least, define, track, and interpret the right KPIs that are aligned with the company mission and vision.
The Brazil case study proves the shift is doable and measurable. Keep the momentum by sharing results in communities like the Brazil Legal Ops KPIs Forum. The transformation starts with one metric, one pilot, one conversation and builds from there.
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