A legal OKR holds up when it measures speed and self-service, not contracts reviewed.
Legal teams often assume OKRs are not for them: the work arrives from outside and quality is binary. But the two things every company wants from legal are speed and predictability, and both are measurable. Contract turnaround, self-serve coverage, escalation rates: all countable, all improvable.
The strongest legal OKRs turn the team from a queue into a system: templates and playbooks that let standard work flow through without review, so legal judgement is spent where it matters.
Objective: Stay audit-ready so enterprise deals never stall on us
Coach’s score ★★★★★
Measurable ★★★★★
Outcome-based ★★★★★
Focused ★★★★★
Niklas Olsson · OKR coach
Objective: Stop being the place deals wait
Coach’s score ★★★★★
Measurable ★★★★★
Outcome-based ★★★★★
Focused ★★★★★
Niklas Olsson · OKR coach
Overall a strong OKR, but the objective could be much more clearly tied to strategy, or to something more inspiring. This is a really good example of how a legal team can connect their work to business revenue, or to a strategy to gain more customer accounts, for example. It is trying to tackle a lot of different issues with one OKR. It looks like this may be the solo OKR for the team for the year.
Even though we say it is focused on improving the speed of the process, it attacks that from so many angles that it becomes a little unfocused. Number two, for example, looks like sales training to work with the template contracts, while number one looks like pure process improvement inside the team, and so on.
Objective: Keep deals moving by answering legal before they hit the queue
Coach’s score ★★★★★
Measurable ★★★★★
Outcome-based ★★★★★
Focused ★★★★★
Niklas Olsson · OKR coach
This is a great support team. This team really knows their mission, what it's all about, and how they can support the rest of the organisation. They identified that they need to keep deals moving, and they have identified how they can measure whether they are actually supporting this process or not.
Looking at the key results, it's a mix of results that can be attacked with a wide variety of tasks or projects. Number one, for example, names a self-serve playbook, which gives some clarity on how the team is approaching this as well. That goes almost into tactics, which is great if this is a quarterly OKR. Overall, very strong.
It measures the service the company experiences: how fast contracts move, how much routine work resolves without a lawyer, how rarely deals stall in review. Volume of contracts reviewed is workload, not progress.
More than most teams expect. Turnaround times, template coverage, escalation rates and internal satisfaction are all countable today. What legal should not put in an OKR is case outcomes it cannot control; measure the system, not the verdicts.
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This is very strong in that legal teams sometimes have issues finding clear, measurable key results. This team has really made an effort to identify how they can measure two things: the outcome of their work, and connect themselves very clearly to business outcomes or to the bigger strategy of the organisation. The objective creates clarity in the team on what is important and that it's actually a sales support team.
I would say the key results are a little thin and unclear outside this team. The objective the rest of the organisation can understand, but I don't think even the sales team that is actually dependent on this understands what results 1 and 2 mean to them, or what work will be performed and what they're aiming for in the team. Strong for this kind of team to have measurable results, but overall a little wacky on what we are actually measuring here. It's not working great as a tool of communication.