Bob Elliott, President of AKS-Labs in Raleigh, NC, sent me examples of his company’s balanced scorecards for legal departments. AKS-Labs offers software, Balanced Scorecard Designer, that automates the development of a scorecard:.
The AKS-Labs litigation scorecard looks at lawsuits from five perspectives, including cost and cycle time, and lets the user change the relative importance of each perspective (weighting their values between 0 and 10). Within each perspective are various “Goals”. The scorecard also has a “Performance” column that lets you change its values.
This litigation scorecard embodies the key ideas of balanced scorecards. Identify a suite of measurements that capture the essential aspects of an activity. In this instance, it is management of the costs, speed and leverage of litigation management. Then collect data for each measurement and weight the relative importance of the measurements. Finally, decide what direction – target – to aspire for as the measurements change (See my post of Feb. 26, 2008: balanced scorecards with 8 references.).