Legal Metrics, the data analytics company for diversity and legal operations, today (1 November) announced that it has hired Ryan Steadman as community & client engagement lead, and Vale (Valentin) Cantu as client onboarding lead.
Legal Metrics was founded by David Cunningham and is a collaborative effort between law firms, law companies, legal departments and tech companies to agree, visualize, and share legal industry metrics. It has created software to automatically calculate diversity and inclusion metrics within law firms.
Steadman, who was previously chief revenue officer at Zero Systems, will lead Legal Metrics’ engagement with its customers as well as the community of over 200 legal leaders who provide feedback on metrics and software features.
“Ryan is not only interested in the stories that the data can tell, but he’s also passionate about making a difference in diversity and inclusion,” said Cunningham, who this summer joined Reed Smith as chief innovation officer. “As we move forward, we needed an advocate for those who are exhausted by manual calculations and realize that it’s time they also have a system for their needs, just like CFO’s, CMO’s, and CHRO’s are expected to have.”
Legal departments, even those with active diversity and legal ops metrics programs, often have limited information from their providers, may be asking them to manually calculate metrics, or may not have automated methods to calculate, display and benchmark their own non-financial legal ops metrics.
Steadman said: “Dave had me at ‘Can you help us make a difference?’ During my time in legal tech and service delivery, it’s clear that the calibre and quality of our community is what drives substantive and organic behavioural change. Legal Metrics has a purpose-built system to help democratize and surface diversity, inclusion and legal ops data and insights, and to act as a catalyst for change. I see tremendous opportunity to help facilitate data and to encourage law firm and legal department leaders to measure and manage metrics that matter,” says Steadman.
Meanwhile Cantu, who was formerly a developer at Iridium, will be responsible for onboarding customers and will work closely with client project teams and data analysts. Before Iridium he was a database developer at Runkle Law Firm in Texas.