Five Crucial Components of Enterprise Legal Management Solutions

The most meaningful enterprise solutions help grow a business.

Enterprise legal management solutions are no exception.

With robust enterprise legal management technology, corporate legal departments can generate gains in efficiency, productivity, business insight and cost savings – all valuable commodities when priorities are quickly shifting.

In this blog post, we’ll run down five of the most valuable parts of enterprise legal management solutions. But first, let’s talk about data vs. process.

Data vs. Process

At the beginning of legal operations management, lawyers and legal professionals relied on tools like spreadsheets, emails and documents to manage information. As corporate legal departments grew in size and complexity, they turned to traditional enterprise legal management vendors that provided a database-centric approach to handling legal operations. Their technology platforms worked as systems of record that only tracked or measured data put into it.

However, and this cannot be over-emphasized, your competitive legal department needs a system of engagement – a system that supports the highly collaborative nature of legal work.

An app-based focus addresses process problems and offers a workflow-based approach. It provides the power of comprehensive enterprise legal management broken into individual task-based solutions and processes, conforming more closely to how people work. Users can also extend their collaborative reach with other corporate departments by incorporating capabilities and components of broader company-wide systems as needed.

Working faster and smarter

When exploring enterprise legal management solutions, ensure that the prospective system can be built around the way teams work. After all, you’re trying to streamline your operations and avoid the old standards of relying on email and spreadsheets to get the job done. In today’s fast-paced legal settings, lawyers need to be able to work faster, smarter and more efficiently. The best way to do it is by automating legal department processes.

There are quite a few benefits of a cutting-edge enterprise legal management solution, including cost savings,  flexibility and robust reporting capabilities. Equally important are the numerous crucial processes that it can help your team with – especially since you’re working towards improving processes.

Here are five of the top components to look for in an enterprise legal management solution:

1. A single platform for collaboration that captures notes, documents, attachments and email communications in one secure location. With all your processes centralized in a single, robust platform, operations are streamlined and optimized to the fullest.

2. Improved collaboration and knowledge sharing that provides more transparency to your operations. Legal departments of any size can reap the benefits of a technology platform that supports the highly integrated, collaborative legal work that reinforces an enterprise’s business goals.

3. Workflow capabilities that match your business requirements and are simple to change, alter or adjust. Different work types, such as matters related to employment, litigation, or mergers, have unique processes. Workflows must be able to evolve quickly as corporate legal departments grow and re-prioritize.

4. Seamless integration with vital systems and the ability to be highly configurable. Corporate legal departments have a wide variety of systems in their technology ecosystems, including document management, intellectual property management, accounts payable and other back-end systems. This allows information to flow and populate as needed automatically across technologies.

5. Reporting and dashboard views that make it easy to analyze invoices, evaluate performance against budget and see trends across your matter portfolio. Intuitive interfaces allow legal professionals to focus on the process and results instead of how the application works. Little or no training is required, which dramatically reduces the time and cost of solution deployment.

With an average cost savings of 4-7% of outside counsel spend, process-oriented enterprise legal management solutions also represent a new paradigm that drastically improves the delivery of legal services. Process-driven solutions integrate workflow and collaboration and allow you to explore and define the legal business processes critical to your organization.

Are you interested in learning more? Here are three steps to help.

1. Explore what other leading corporate departments are accomplishing with a platform and process approach to enterprise legal management. For example, Corteva used technology provided by Onit and our partner PERSUIT to build a global panel of law firms. As a result, its legal operations leader helped the company significantly reduce average prices across vendors – by up to 60% in some cases – and increase outside counsel engagement
2. Join Lean into Legal Ops. The comprehensive thought leadership initiative, offered at no charge, provides legal and business professionals masterclasses, case studies and discussions with industry thought leaders and innovators. For the U.S., join here. For Europe, join here.
3. Learn about building better workflows and how they can help you build a better business by asking for a demonstration of Onit Enterprise Legal Management Solutions.