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Measuring Quality in Law Firms: Towards an Integrated Client-Centered Model

Quality in legal services

Quality in legal services has become a strategic pillar for the competitiveness of law firms in an environment shaped by digitalization, transparency, and new client expectations. For decades, quality has been assessed mainly through internal parameters—billable hours, litigation success, profitability, or portfolio volume—which, although relevant, do not fully reflect the client’s experience or the final value of the service. In recent years, other professional service sectors have moved toward models centered on user-reported perceptions and outcomes. Healthcare is the clearest example: PREM (Patient-Reported Experience Measures) and PROM (Patient-Reported Outcome Measures) systems have transformed the way care quality is evaluated by placing the patient’s voice at the center. This raises the question of whether such an approach can be transferred to the legal field, where the relationship between professional and user shares key elements with the doctor-patient relationship.

In the legal context, quality can be understood as a multidimensional phenomenon in which technical expertise, the quality of lawyer-client interaction, process efficiency, and the client’s subjective perception of the support received and the final outcome all converge. The technical dimension—encompassing legal competence, argumentative precision, and regulatory updating—is essential, but not sufficient. The relational dimension carries increasing weight: the clarity with which risks are explained, the accessibility of the professional, the ability to manage expectations, and the empathy shown throughout the process. To this is added operational quality, visible in response times, internal coordination, technological tools, transparency in fees, and data protection. Finally, perceived quality represents the client’s overall emotional and cognitive synthesis of the entire experience.

The extrapolation of PREM and PROM models is especially relevant for this last dimension. Adapted to the legal field, they can become powerful tools for capturing both the client’s experience during the legal process (Legal PREM or L-PREM) and the client’s assessment of the outcome (Legal PROM or L-PROM). While the former would provide insight into how the client experienced each phase of their relationship with the firm—whether they understood the information, felt supported, and perceived transparency—the latter would help evaluate the impact of the legal service beyond procedural success: whether the outcome restored security, emotional stability, business certainty, or a sense of material justice. This perspective complements the purely technical view and highlights areas for improvement that would otherwise remain invisible.

Integrating these metrics into a management dashboard makes it possible to articulate a more complete view of the firm’s performance. The client perspective would gain real weight by combining L-PREM, L-PROM, overall satisfaction, and service-recommendation metrics. The internal perspective would continue to play a central role by focusing on process efficiency and team coordination. The learning and development dimension would capture the progress of technical, communicative, and digital skills, as well as professional wellbeing and talent retention. Finally, the economic perspective would include profitability, fee efficiency, and portfolio stability. The added value of this approach lies in its balance: it does not privilege financial outcomes alone but integrates the human, procedural, and relational dimensions that make legal services perceived as excellent.

The use of client-centered metrics nonetheless presents methodological challenges: it requires clear questions, avoidance of bias, confidentiality guarantees, and safeguards to ensure that professionals handling highly complex or emotionally charged cases are not unfairly penalized. Measurement must be rigorous, combining qualitative and quantitative data, and should be used with a spirit of continuous improvement rather than as a punitive control mechanism.

In short, the experience of the healthcare sector shows that systematically incorporating the user’s voice improves outcomes, strengthens trust, and enables the design of more efficient and humane services. Law firms have a similar opportunity: to move toward a comprehensive quality model that not only values technical excellence but also captures how clients experience their legal processes and what real impact they gain from them. Such an approach, structured through a balanced and experience-oriented dashboard, can become a differentiating factor in a market that is increasingly competitive and transparency-driven. This evolution would benefit not only the firms themselves but also the legal system as a whole by bringing it closer to citizen-oriented models and generating broader social value.