Starting with one consulting clients and improving it over time, I created this index. It has six major indicators of law department effectiveness. They include focus on core competencies, total legal spending as a percentage of revenue, leverage, aligned practices, and management of outside counsel.
You can score a law department between 1 and 5 on each of those measures. Then, I gave a relative weight to each of those measures because the first 2 were more important than the latter 3. If you multiply the score times the weight you obtain the aggregate metric for the department. That number, divided by the total potential score, results in the effectiveness index.
I would be pleased to send my summary of this index to those who request it. Just email me and ask for the index.