General counsel need to gather metrics regarding their departments and present those metrics effectively within the department, not to mention to the chief executive officer, their peers and the board. Not only will they manage better as they gain fluency in metrics, they will come to realize that metrics illuminated with good graphics plots and charts will lead to insights and will let them proclaim their management results.
Text descriptions of numbers remain woefully abstruse and long; tables of numbers mutely convey their message. As collection and analysis of data in law departments matures, those who work with numbers will increasingly want to employ more sophisticated graphics. Indeed, the future of law department management rides on data analytics plus graphics that merge some text with vivid charts.
