Legal departments can compile key performance indicators from information on legal costs, law department staffing, workload/cost and external fee arrangements, a legal consultant says. Stephen Mabey recommends that legal departments compile KPIs which can also help law firms. On legal costs for example, he recommends using, for their KPI model, the  internal legal spend per revenue, external legal costs per revenue, total legal expense per revenue and major department expenses as a percentage of total expense. In his column 'Measuring legal department metrics' in the Canadian Lawyer, Stephen Mabey says that one common theme from in-house lawyers was the need for 'granularity in the types of legal matters handled as a ratio to total number of matters handled so as to have a kPI that tracks the "mix" of files that in-house lawyers are handling.'  Source: Canadian Lawyer