Dormant time as a metric of law firm litigation performance

Plaintiff’s counsel often drags their feet or courts go into deep freeze. A company’s litigation counsel incurs minimal costs during those hibernation periods; cycle time has no applicability when no wheels are turning. An unorthodox indicator of successful performance by a litigation firm perhaps, but quiescence serves a defendant at times.

The fact that some cases lie fallow for months at a time is true, and it seems counter-productive for a law department to want to measure cycle time for cases where the company spends nothing while the plaintiff or the judge dithers.