Six Sigma Tutorials -> Balancing Your Legal Scorecard - Part 2   by Richard Hall

The Balanced Scorecard Perspectives - The Legal Department Perspective

Delivering added organizational satisfaction can be achieved through the operational activities of the legal department. Through the Balanced Scorecard framework organizational focused measures can be supported by measures of the legal management processes that are most critical in meeting the organizations expectations. The objectives and measures for this perspective thus enable a focus on maintaining and improving the performance of those processes that deliver the objectives established as key to satisfying the organizations financial objectives, which in turn satisfy stakeholders.

With this approach, the Balanced Scorecard offers a vehicle to focus on a complete value chain of integrated business processes. It is this that represents one of the major opportunities for the benefits that the Balanced Scorecard can provide over traditional departmental performance measurement systems.

This top-down value-chain process can reveal entirely new areas, within the legal department's business processes, where an organization can gain additional advantage.

The effect can be phenomenal; a reduction in process costs of 1% when combined with an identical reduction in wastage can typically deliver an increase in profits of over 15%.