Workload Forecasting & Diagnostics: The Discipline Behind High‑Performance In‑House Legal Teams

Executive Premise: You must own your data analytics agenda

Workload forecasting and diagnostics is not complicated. What makes it rare is not technical difficulty, advanced analytics, or expensive systems – it is ownership.

Most in‑house legal teams already have everything they need to understand their workload: the work itself, the people doing it, the points where matters slow down, the requests that should never have reached a lawyer, and the spend that feels too high but is hard to explain.

What they usually lack is a deliberate decision to treat workload understanding as a core leadership responsibility rather than something that might emerge incidentally from a CLMS, a dashboard, or a future “analytics phase”.

This paper makes four propositions.

First, most in‑house legal teams are not doing workload forecasting and diagnostics in any formal or sustained way.

Second, you do not need sophisticated systems to start – and buying them early often delays progress rather than accelerating it.

Third, there is a proven glide path to mastery that delivers immediate value, compounds over time, and creates the discipline required for more advanced technology to work when you eventually adopt it.

Fourth, too many teams (especially larger teams), think they will buy a software solution (eg a CLMS) that will instantly portal them through to data analytical utopia. This is wrong - it almost never happens. And, it is not needed. 

So, this whitepaper is going to share with in-house leaders everything they need to know in order to get their head around workload forecasting and diagnostics - you can also call it legal analytics. 

1. Why This Matters More Than Almost Anything Else Legal Can Do

In‑house legal teams rarely struggle because their lawyers are not capable. They frequently struggle because demand is unmanaged and poorly understood.

Pressure builds quietly. Volumes increase year on year. Turnaround expectations shorten. Exceptions multiply. Senior lawyers find themselves dragged into routine work. External spend grows without a clear narrative as to why.

By the time the issue is acknowledged, the discussion is already framed in the least productive way possible – emotional, reactive, and defensive.

“We’re overloaded.”

“We need more people.”

“We need better systems.”

Without evidence, those statements are hard to defend. They may be true, but they are not persuasive - and any requests by the in-house leader for resources to deal with the problem - fuels the "legal as an out of contorl cost centre narrative". 

Workload forecasting and diagnostics changes the nature of these conversations. Let that sink in!

It allows legal leaders to explain pressure rather than simply feel it. It enables them to articulate where demand is coming from, what type of work is consuming capacity, where it slows down, and what will happen if demand increases by a further ten percent next year.

That shift – from instinct to evidence – is the difference between reacting to workload and managing it. And when you combine that with the discipline of evidencing how your legal team investments deliver verifiable ROI (another data analytics discpline) - then legal is no longer a cost centre - its a value creater.  

Workload forecasting and diagnostics is as adiscipline sits upstream of almost every other legal operations initiative. Process improvement, self‑service, automation, headcount decisions, technology investments, KPIs, benchmarking, and transformation planning all depend on a clear understanding of workload. If that understanding is weak, everything downstream is compromised.

And as a  low cost initiative for most legal teams - it is a game changing self help strategy that in-house leaders will increasingly loose credibility if they choose to ignore it.  

2. Why We Use the Term “Workload Forecasting & Diagnostics”

The legal industry has not helped itself with language. “Legal analytics” sounds abstract, technical, and vendor‑led. For many senior lawyers it triggers an immediate – and understandable – scepticism that what follows will be complex, expensive, and disconnected from day‑to‑day reality.

We use the term workload forecasting and diagnostics deliberately. It describes what the discipline actually involves: understanding the flow of work through the legal team, identifying patterns, and using that insight to make better decisions. It is practical, accessible, and grounded in the realities of in‑house practice.

Technically, this work does sit within the broader category of legal analytics. More specifically, it is process‑level and workload‑level analytics. But labels are less important than outcomes.

This paper is not about turning lawyers into data scientists or building elaborate dashboards. It is about helping legal leaders run their function deliberately rather than by feel.

3. Metrics, KPIs, and Why Order Matters

Most legal teams jump too quickly to KPIs. That impulse is understandable – KPIs feel tangible and reassuring – but it is usually premature.

Metrics are simply signals: volumes, cycle times, costs, frequencies, distributions. They are plentiful, noisy, and often messy. KPIs, by contrast, are a choice. They are the small number of metrics selected because they meaningfully influence behaviour and decision‑making.

The mistake many teams make is selecting KPIs before they understand their workload. When that happens, they often measure what is easy rather than what matters, and optimise behaviours that do not address the real constraints on performance.

The correct sequence is straightforward: 

1. Diagnose the work first.
2. Understand the patterns and pressure points. Decide what genuinely matters.
3. Then – and only then – formalise KPIs. In practice, well‑chosen KPIs tend to emerge naturally once diagnostic insight exists.

4. What Workload Forecasting & Diagnostics Actually Involves

At its simplest, workload forecasting and diagnostics is the disciplined examination of a small set of fundamental questions.

Who is sending work to legal?

What are they asking for?

How does that work flow through the team?

How long does it take at each stage? Who actually does the work?

When and why does it go to external counsel?

What does it cost?

How does the business experience the service it receives?

What is the scope for efficiency improvements?

Most in‑house teams can answer these questions anecdotally. Very few can answer them systematically. That distinction is critical. Anecdote lives in individual experience and is hard to share, defend, or scale. Systematic insight, by contrast, can be embedded into the operating model and used repeatedly to inform decisions.

The objective is not reporting for its own sake. The objective is decision‑grade insight – insight that directly informs how the legal function is structured, resourced, and prioritised.

5. A Market Reality Check

It is important to state this plainly, because it reassures rather than criticises.

The vast majority of in‑house legal teams do not conduct formal workload forecasting or diagnostics. Even sophisticated teams tend to rely on the instincts of experienced leaders, informal feedback from the business, and visible pain points such as backlog or external spend spikes.

Those instincts are often directionally accurate, particularly where leaders have deep organisational knowledge. But they have limits. Instinct is difficult to transfer, impossible to audit, and weak when challenged by finance or the executive team.

The moment a legal leader seeks additional investment – whether headcount, technology, or automation – instinct loses persuasive power. Data does not replace judgement, but it gives judgement credibility. That is the real value of workload diagnostics.

6. The Workload Diagnostic Framework (Explained in Practice)

Up to this point, the case for workload forecasting and diagnostics has been conceptual. This section is where it becomes practical.

When teams hear the word “framework”, they often expect something abstract or academic. That is not what follows. The diagnostic framework below is simply a structured way of looking at the work legal already does every day. It does not introduce new complexity; it introduces clarity.

The core idea is straightforward: if you want to understand, forecast, and ultimately optimise legal workload, you must look at it from several complementary angles at the same time. Looking at only one dimension – volume, or cost, or turnaround – will always give you a distorted picture. The power comes from seeing how those dimensions interact.

Who Is Sending Work to Legal

Every workload problem starts with demand. Yet most legal teams have only a vague sense of where that demand is actually coming from.

In practice, demand is rarely evenly distributed. A small number of individuals, teams, or business units often generate a disproportionate share of legal requests. Sometimes that concentration is appropriate – a high‑growth business unit, a regulated function, or a deal‑heavy region. Often, however, it reflects something else: a lack of capability in the business, poor upstream processes, or an over‑reliance on legal for low‑risk decisions.

Understanding who is sending work to legal allows leaders to move beyond generalised statements like “the business is busy” and into much more useful conversations. It enables questions such as: which roles consume the most legal capacity, whether that demand is increasing or stabilising, and whether it is driven by genuine risk or by habit. Over time, this insight becomes critical for forecasting, training, and stakeholder management.

What Work Is Being Requested

Not all legal work has the same value, risk profile, or optimisation potential. Treating it as if it does is one of the fastest ways to exhaust a team.

A disciplined workload diagnostic requires work to be categorised in a consistent way. This does not need to be overly granular, but it does need to be agreed. Contract work, advisory support, disputes, compliance activities, corporate governance, and regulatory matters behave very differently in terms of predictability, cycle time, and resourcing requirements.

Once work is categorised, additional layers of insight become possible. Some work is genuinely strategic and high‑risk; some is routine and repeatable. Some lends itself naturally to automation or self‑service; some does not. Without making these distinctions explicit, legal teams end up applying senior attention to low‑value work while under‑investing in areas that genuinely matter.

This is also where the seeds of future efficiency are planted. If you cannot clearly describe the work coming in, you will never be able to redesign how it is handled.

How Work Enters and Flows Through Legal

This is the point at which many analytics initiatives quietly fail.

Most legal teams would like to have an “official” legal instruction intake protocol - but most dont. Instructions are received via email, messaging apps, corridor conversations, and forwarded threads  - and sometime not at all.  Work is picked up opportunistically - clients approach their favourite lawyers.  Approvals happen offline. Does this sound like your legal team?

From an analytics perspective, this matters enormously. If work is not flowing through a consistent intake and handling mechanism, system‑generated data will always be partial and often misleading.

From a management perspective, it matters even more. Understanding how work actually flows – where it waits, where it loops back, where it gets stuck – is essential for identifying bottlenecks that have nothing to do with legal capability and everything to do with process design.

How Long the Work Takes – and Why

Cycle time is one of the most frequently cited indicators of legal performance, yet it is also one of the most misunderstood.

When turnaround times are long, the default assumption is often that legal is slow. In reality, delays are far more commonly caused by poor intake information, waiting for business approvals, unclear prioritisation, or negotiation dynamics that sit outside legal’s control.

Breaking cycle time down into stages is therefore far more useful than looking at averages. It allows legal leaders to see where time is actually spent and to distinguish between delay that is inherent to the work and delay that is avoidable. This is critical for both process improvement and for setting realistic expectations with stakeholders.

How the Work Is Resourced

Workload diagnostics inevitably raises uncomfortable questions about who is doing what work.

In many teams, senior lawyers spend a surprising amount of time on low‑risk, repeatable tasks. Paralegals and junior lawyers may be under‑utilised. External counsel may be engaged not because work is complex, but because internal capacity is poorly aligned.

Looking at workload through a resourcing lens allows these issues to be discussed as design problems rather than personal critiques. It enables legal leaders to ask whether the current mix of roles is appropriate, whether work is being routed to the right level, and whether capacity constraints are structural or temporary.

Financial and Spend Signals

Connecting workload to cost is where diagnostics becomes particularly powerful.

External spend rarely appears at random. It tends to cluster around particular work types, business units, or moments of internal pressure. Without workload data, these patterns are hard to see and even harder to explain.

By linking demand, handling, and cycle time to spend, legal leaders can move beyond blunt cost‑cutting conversations and into much more sophisticated analysis. They can distinguish between spend that reflects genuine complexity and spend that is compensating for internal design flaws.

Client Experience and Quality Signals

Finally, workload must be viewed through the lens of outcome and experience.

Speed alone is not success. A fast answer that creates rework or undermines trust is not a win. Diagnostics should therefore include signals relating to quality, consistency, and stakeholder satisfaction.

This does not require elaborate surveys. Even basic indicators – repeat queries, template adherence, escalation rates – can provide valuable insight when viewed in the context of workload and flow.

Taken together, these dimensions form a complete picture of how legal work enters the function, how it is handled, and where value is created or lost. Importantly, none of this requires sophisticated systems. It requires a structured way of looking at what is already happening.