Evaluating legal services: The need for a quality movement and standard measures of quality and value

Abstract

The legal industry has not undergone a quality movement and lacks standard measures of legal-services quality and value. Whereas medicine long ago embraced evidence-based practice and empiricism, law muddles along, deferring to lawyers’ untested, normative standards. As a result, existing work product and data about legal services is of questionable quality. Given that data analytics and artificial intelligence require high-quality training data, law’s lack of attention to quality and empirical rigor threatens progress. Additionally, these failures contribute to numerous legal industry problems, including inadequate access to legal services and justice, a lack of diversity, and work-life imbalances. This article discusses the need for a quality movement, including standard work, error detection, peer review, and performance measurement. This article also explores methods, models, and metrics for measuring legal-services quality and value. Finally, the article discusses stakeholder benefits of a quality movement and developing standard metrics for legal-services quality and value.