Category: Business Process Management

4 Benefits of Modern Legal Spend Management Software

Posted on December 15, 2022 by - Business Process Management, Enterprise Legal Management

In today’s economic climate, companies are increasingly focused on optimizing both internal and external resources; Legal is no exception. From simple spend visibility to cost control and efficiency, modern legal spend management solutions are helping forward-thinking General Counsels make more strategic, data-driven decisions about how they invest their outside counsel spend.

But what benefits can you expect from your legal spend management system? Let’s break them down here:

1. Better Strategic Decisions Driven By Data

When it comes to managing your outside counsel spend, everything (and we mean everything) starts with your data.

Legal billing — from getting rate visibility to discount clarity — is complicated. For example, your rate card and the effective rates you actually pay may be very different. Understanding that (and many other aspects of your bills) is critical to effective budgeting, forecasting, and strong outside counsel vendor management.

Knowing your numbers like the back of your hand won’t only help with budgeting or operational efficiency. Data will also help you make better, faster decisions. For example, which firm in a panel is most efficient for certain matter types? Are you overpaying because of inappropriate staffing decisions (e.g., partners executing associate level tasks or consistent meeting overstaffing)?

Fast access to trustworthy data that can be sliced and diced to support your business’ specific needs and your specific questions will not only save you and your team time and money, but it will also give you the fuel you need to make truly informed decisions fast.

2. Clear “Should Cost” Understanding

What should that big matter you have coming up actually cost? It’s a question GCs and finance departments ask themselves all the time, with little success. RFPs are often wildly off when it comes to predicting costs. It’s common for a matter to cost 150-200% of the firm’s original bid. So, what’s the best way to anticipate what a big upcoming matter will cost?

True, market-driven benchmarking is the only way to not only anticipate more accurate costs for upcoming matters, but also to obtain the most competitive rates or AFAs.

However, benchmarking can be tricky. Make sure your benchmarking solution considers practice area, matter type, and tier of firm. For example, you can’t compare complex real estate litigation with standard insurance claims litigation. You also can’t compare insurance claims litigation costs for one cause of loss with another, or from one jurisdiction to another. So, make sure your benchmarks allow you to get granular; anything less can leave you holding the bag on a very big and unexpected bill!

3. Better Governance

Managing your outside counsel firms can be challenging. Just enforcing guidelines accountability is not only time consuming but can also be like finding a needle in an intentionally large haystack. Even getting visibility on their staffing practices can be tough.

Modern legal spend management software can remove the headaches of guidelines compliance and provide much-needed visibility on staffing and billing practices for both you and your firms. Some solutions provide easy-to-use firm report cards that show trends over time on everything — average hours per matter, timekeeper breakdowns, rates, and more. When shared with your firms, report cards provide a fantastic basis for effective management; many forward-thinking GCs use them to drive quarterly or biannual reviews.

4. Clean, Structured, Usable Data

Data can provide a window into performance, highlighting meaningful opportunities for improvement. Most successful businesses have leveraged data for years to inform strategic decisions as well as operational efficiency – but not so much in legal departments.

Legal billing data is a necessity to understand all aspects of success. However, historically, legal billing data has been a mess (to put it mildly). With no standard taxonomy (way of organizing data), copious human error, and unique domain challenges led to a web of tangled data that in most cases just didn’t line up. With no apples-to-apples comparison possible, data often led to misleading takeaways and potentially poor decisions.

But, never fear. Advanced legal billing software can help you make sense of your data. By leveraging new technologies like machine learning and AI, cutting edge legal billing solutions can not only structure the data you have but also correct errors and enhance the data to allow for deeper insights.

Get in touch with our team of legal billing and data experts to find out how Onit can transform your legal department.

6 Ways Your Contract Portfolio May Be Losing Value

Posted on December 14, 2022 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

Is your organization making the most of your contract portfolio? Learn how to take control and up-level your portfolio’s value with solutions that can reduce revenue leakage, provide more meaningful oversight, and unlock tremendous material impact — all while helping your department connect more deeply across the enterprise.

If a company is a house of business, then contracts are its foundation — so much so that many industries often have 90% or more of their annual revenue locked into contracts, according to McKinsey & Company.

On the flip side, a lack of efficient contract management can lead to diminished visibility, inconsistent workflows, damaged vendor and supplier relationships, and an erosion of value to your contract portfolio at an average of 9% — and as much as 15% — revenue loss each year.

Here are six ways your contract portfolio may be losing value and how you turn that around today:

1. Lack of pricing tier awareness.

Contracts determine the financial flow of an organization, with each one carrying its own set of terms and risks. There is term-based pricing, release orders that may delay the purchase, and evergreen contracts that could contain and express entirely different obligations — as well as any agreement your company, well, agrees to. However, when the buy side often proffers a “take as long as you wish” philosophy while the sell side supports cash-in-hand as fast as possible, making certain to keep clear note of more flexible (even unfavorable) tiers can empower your department to avoid revenue leakage.

2. Missing deadlines and renewals.

For many contracts, there is a certain sequence that can lead to penalties if not followed. These can be financial in nature such as fees, fines, and compensatory damages, but they may also include long-term ramifications, like damaged reputation or even vendor or client loss. Establishing customer expectations and clarifying consistent protocols like project timelines, production schedules, and delivery dates can help your department stay on top of important milestones and eliminate lost time and missed revenue opportunities.

3. Not holding vendors to terms.

Procurement contracts cement the partnership between buyers and suppliers. What vendors does our company use? What rates were negotiated? It’s all black-and-white in the contract. But if a company is lax about delivering what was agreed upon, all negotiations can be invalid. Don’t let a lack of visibility into spend performance get away from your business, as diligent enforcement of negotiated supplier terms is a primary source of revenue.

4. Playing “ostrich” with the risks.

Contracts are, by nature, conduits of risk mitigation — so even the simplest one can lay an organization bare to liability if not handled properly. Especially in a tumultuous macroeconomic market laden with pandemic supply chain issues and geopolitical conflict, it is crucial to maintain current regulatory knowledge, know how to adapt quickly to new financial guidelines, and be aware of which contracts in your portfolio have clauses built in to address risk. The ability to not bury your head in the sand and quickly pivot to examine contracts for risk compliance will speed time to future revenue.

5. A sense of disorganization.

One reason a contract portfolio may lose value is the simple chaos of our busy business lives. A study published in the Journal of Contract Management revealed that seven in 10 companies find it challenging to find vital documents, despite contracts being a critical business tool and source of value. The need to search for contracts is a thief of time better spent on higher-value tasks, such as analyzing data insights or becoming an advocate for meaningful diversity and inclusivity. Launching, migrating, and archiving a secure, central, and digital document repository with a keyword search tool will promote better transparency across functions and contribute to faster revenue recognition.

6. Reluctance to add automation and AI to the mix.

Manual contract management programs that involve spreadsheet-based processes are not only time prohibitive and labor-intensive — often usurping at least half of most legal professionals’ workdays — but also devoid of the insight that advances true efficiency. However, contract lifecycle management (CLM) solutions powered by artificial intelligence (AI) take visibility and efficiency to the next level by automating manual workflows and alerting teams to necessary updates and improvements. As a result, the most innovative can redline contracts in under two minutes, applying your company’s playbook and accelerating contract review by up to 70%.

A crossroad of opportunity and growth

The creation and execution of contracts comprise accountability, obligation, and trust. Visibility is also essential for discovering and assessing the risk that could disrupt business. Examining your contract portfolio regularly will help your department retain control, reduce rogue spending, and embrace collaboration across the enterprise. With this new era of CLM, innovation is at your fingertips to execute contracts more effectively and efficiently. This way, your team can focus on what matters most: unlocking the value of your existing contract portfolio, optimizing strategic and meaningful new partnerships, and skyrocketing your department’s revenue generation and operational excellence.

Learn how Onit’s next-generation CLM solutions and AI-powered innovations meet you where you work with end-to-end automation of the contract management process to cultivate partnerships, elevate efficiency, and ignite revenue growth for enterprise-wide success.

How Legal Ops Can Bring Value to an Organization 

Posted on December 14, 2022 by - Business Process Management

Recently, Morae’s Managing Director Bret Baccus and Onit’s Senior VP of Strategy and Growth Brad Rogers sat down for a wide-ranging discussion (view the full conversation here). As part of the conversation, they discussed the best ways legal ops can start to bring value to the overall organization. Hear their thoughts on this issue in this edited excerpt.

Getting started

BRAD: Bret, we’re talking to many legal departments with various sizes, levels of experience, and types of clients. Many folks want to get started on the legal ops journey to help bring value to the organization. What is a good place to begin?

BRET: At Morae, we work with a wide range of clients — from experienced Fortune 50 companies to small departments at the beginning of the maturity model. When we think about where to start, one essential element is to ensure you have a legal operations lead who can help guide the organization through this journey. When we think about the maturity model, there are a ton of other things to consider — but making sure you have that strong legal ops support and lead is critical for getting started.

BRAD: What are some practical pointers for legal ops leaders new to the role? Perhaps they were a lawyer, paralegal, or change agent somewhere else in the company. How can they deliver this change or provide the future of law to the department?

BRET: Being that change agent is critical. Bringing in change management principles, no matter your role, is a great idea. For example, try working groups for different areas you need to address and tackle problems that way versus the traditional hierarchical approach to problem-solving. Effective change management automatically positions you as a change leader. If you are leading an initiative and putting together teams to successfully deliver on these initiatives, that will be a driver of positive change throughout the organization.

Delivering savings

BRAD: Determining where to start depends on what lever you are trying to move. One of those levers could be delivering savings. There are a couple of places with existing waste where you would not get a ton of resistance to implementing change. For example: what does our outside counsel spend look like now? If you can quantify in your prior spend that there are rules that are not being followed thanks to a lack of awareness or education, that’s easy money. Could that fund a successful transformation journey? It could add substantial savings on outside counsel and outside counsel spend management.

BRET: Outside counsel spend management is an entire, beneficial journey you can go on. You can even check if your outside counsel guidelines are up to date with industry best practices; for example, maybe you don’t pay for legal research invoices, but do you also not pay for legal research time? Have you updated not to include electronic transmissions? Those could lead to some savings.

However, the real savings around outside counsel time comes from examining the strategic alignment of work that comes in, along with the risk and complexity of the work that is coming in and putting in a program that aligns that spend to the type of firm needed. That’s one transformational aspect; instead of going to your default Am Law 50 or Am Law 100 firms, is there an opportunity to look at regional or boutique firms that provide the same quality of service when the risk is not the same?

In transforming the department as a new legal ops person, you can implement processes not as far along on the maturity model. Perhaps you have only annualized budgets in place for the legal department, and you can peel that onion back in legal ops and put it in place in conjunction with your ELM system budgeting based on matter spend thresholds, breaking that down by timekeeper level and other things, and putting in place review levels of the matters. With that alone, we’ve seen savings between 2% to 5% just by implementing standardized budgeting at a more granular level within the department.

Utilizing data to gain insights

BRAD: If you’re a legal ops leader with a new mandate or an opportunity to drive savings in their legal organization in the legal department, one way to start is “inventing data,” I’ll call it. If you can’t go into a system and get data one way, try surveying your lawyers and asking how they allocate their time towards different areas of legal specialties. You can take those fractional amounts of time they spend on specific tasks, get a data set, and look for insights.

Are there areas of practice we could do something different with more modern methods that could free up lawyers to do additional work, lower our costs, or deliver even more sophisticated law through engaging an outside partner?

BRET: I couldn’t agree more. It’s a great place to start. Over the last couple of years, the trend has been more insourcing of specialized work; because more departments have more of that spend data, they’re able to look and get insights. Data privacy is a good example. How much are we spending on data privacy in a given year? How many different firms or locations do we have that spread across? That’s just one example. Over the last three or so years, more insourcing of specialty work has been occurring by utilizing departments’ spend data.

BRAD: Have you seen opportunities where someone could get started on understanding the flow in the front door and how they might take that data and do something with it that is impactful?

BRET: Absolutely. So, we are considering what I call legal service request intake and how we manage and think about that. The answer is yes. This is an area where more departments are beginning to look at how they intake work into the department — what does the volume look like, and how do they intake it? You can start that process. As a new legal ops person, you can begin by determining whether you’re tracking your internal matters.

Before you go to a legal service request, are you utilizing your matter management system to track matters used for external work and all the legal department work? Are you examining the service or value provided to the department not just in terms of contracts and commercials but the corporate support and potentially IP support, everything the department’s doing for the business? That’s where I would start first: are you currently tracking the system or the data? Then I’m excited to talk about how we can bring value to the department and the business regarding where that intake begins.

Click here to view the entire conversation between Bret and Brad.

Leveraging AI-Enabled Dashboards and System Integrations to Simplify Contract Management

Posted on December 7, 2022 by - Business Process Management

Contracts are crucial to the success of any organization — but guiding them from initiation and creation through execution can feel like an endless uphill battle. Fortunately, there are state-of-the-art solutions that can reduce time spent on contracts, automate processes, and decrease manual work so your department can focus more on what matters most.

Throughout the course of history, contracts have defined history. From the Declaration of Independence to the Paris Agreement, contracts have developed nations, delivered freedom, and established peace. Contracts are no exception when it comes to business, whether it’s merging corporate giants like Disney and Marvel or creating legally binding documents for your enterprise.

In fact, nearly half (43%) of legal departments globally handle up to 1,000 contracts every year — a towering number that catapults even higher in the United Kingdom, where one in four (25%) legal professionals processes more than 2,000 contracts annually, according to the 2022 Enterprise Legal Reputation (ELR) Report. And with two in five (40%) respondents spending four to five hours each day poring over them, nearly half of every work week, quarter, and fiscal year is spent on contract review.

Moreover, slowly executed contracts adversely impact business, negatively affecting everything from deal closure and revenue generation (44%) to mergers and acquisitions (23%). Further, during what tends to be a labor-intensive and non-cost-effective process for Legal, other functions — such as Sales and Procurement — may be left wondering what stage their contracts are in, what the next steps are, and when they can expect to move forward.

However, contracting doesn’t have to feel overwhelming and seemingly infinite. Implementing an end-to-end contract lifecycle management (CLM) solution that meets you where you work can empower your business teams by automating the contract lifecycle, elevating collaboration, efficiency, and productivity across your entire enterprise — and enhancing partnerships with internal clients, customers, and vendors, too.

MAKE YOUR WORK WORK FOR YOU

Most organizations have repositories of contracts, but many do not have a structured process for storing and extracting relevant data for analysis. This can make drafting and executing contracts and the commercial policies and regulatory changes that contracts oversee arduous. Enter artificial intelligence (AI), which can enhance your data and allow for actionable decision-making.

An AI-enabled dashboard can unlock the data in contracts to influence faster business results by providing deeper visibility and the insight to assess varying levels of risk within a contract portfolio. With the dashboard’s ability to automatically calculate a risk score and present that information based on developed playbooks, Legal can clarify its contracts and review them more expeditiously. Further, sales and procurement professionals can leverage AI to report on cycle times and portfolio value trends, determine additional sourcing and profit optimization areas, and negotiate price breaks.

Introducing a clause library allows for even higher-level oversight and greater data-driven efficiencies. A library of specifically tailored, up-to-date contract generation templates with a central clause bank that captures new clauses regarding terms, details, and technical “legalese” eliminates the need to review contracts line by line. This ensures consistency, identifies issues often missed (even by professionals) to mitigate risk, and automates the process so Legal doesn’t have to spend time customizing contracts for typical agreements – and has been proven to increase productivity by as much as 50%.

MAKE YOUR WORK FLOW

Another way to simplify the contract management process is by pairing a robust contract management solution with a cutting-edge cloud-based system. All too often, when contracts are negotiated, significant details — such as fees and obligations — can get lost post-signature. For example, Procurement generally pays invoices when they come in; thus, they may not have kept negotiated terms top of mind. So how can they comply with supplier pricing and give more visibility into post-execution workflows?

Integrating systems can combine the benefits of both platforms, creating a streamlined contract workflow process that flows final contracts and data for ongoing management while improving transparency, amplifying efficiency, and enforcing compliance by reporting on commercial terms in a structured form. In turn, this can contribute to speeding sales cycles and time to revenue up to 24%.

MAKE YOUR WORK CONNECT

There is no denying that the contract process has become exponentially complex. Still, managing it doesn’t have to be.

What’s more, contracting has the capability to connect Legal more closely to the enterprise. Every department creates and manages contracts. Every department hires people, negotiates with clients, and makes agreements that ultimately lead to contracts. By taking control of the contract management process, your business will phase out data silos, remedy contractual issues, and embolden relationships between internal functions, while accelerating cost and operational efficiency as well as material impact. By tracking dashboard insights and utilizing AI-powered playbooks to identify key terms and clauses, Legal has the opportunity to become more strategic, visible, and efficient, giving Sales and Procurement greater transparency and agility – all while saving up to 9% in overall legal spend each year.

The practice of law is unequivocally an art. Technology has become an essential tool for contracts and a catalyst for growth, competition, and differentiation. CLM solutions augmented by AI-enabled dashboards and coupled with system integrations are a merging of art and science that represents a revolutionary new age of collaboration, innovation, and evolution today — as well as the promise of impactive business success for future tomorrows.

 Tired of Slow, Manual Contract Reviews?

AI can do the heavy lifting. Onit’s ReviewAI speeds up contract analysis, reduces manual effort, and ensures accuracy—all in minutes.

See it in action

 

Embracing the Paradigm Shift: Enterprise Legal Management and AI

Posted on November 30, 2022 by - Business Process Management, Enterprise Legal Management

This article was first published on LegalDive. 

The history of enterprise legal management (ELM) is a study of slow-moving but immensely consequential shifts in purpose, mission and access. For several years, ELM was limited to matter management and spend management. After that, the first paradigm shift occurred when the best ELM platforms began to facilitate engagement, focus on process, offer a user-friendly environment, empower organizations and enable management of many other legal methods.

The second paradigm shift is happening now, taking advantage of the advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technology. Today, the top ELM tools combine the powers of artificial intelligence with existing ELM rules to offer a game-changing solution for legal teams. This combination enables legal to operate faster, more accurately, and more efficiently — in everything from invoice processing and contract management to vendor management and many other tasks.

Just as critical to legal departments are the data insights that this new combination provides. ELM’s embrace of AI empowers organizations to look between the rules to find missed savings, provide real-time invoice error detection and analyze how vendors and bill reviewers perform.

So, with all the insights and efficiency this combination of AI and ELM can provide, why are some still hesitant to embrace the change? The embrace of this paradigm shift is not universal – and their arguments deserve examination.

Let’s look at the three most common arguments against AI:

It’s not worth the hype.

The most common blowback against this is simple: AI-enabled technology isn’t worth the hype.

“We have yet to see AI tools in this industry that fully replace people or processes,” one e-discovery specialist says in a LegalTech News piece. “They are better marketed as augmenting a procedure, improving the performance of a team or workstream, or adding automation and precision to workflows.”

True, AI is not sufficiently advanced to replace lawyers or remove critical thinking from processes, but this does not mean there isn’t a huge amount of value in what AI can do now. Where AI excels is in augmenting the work of legal professionals (typically the stuff they don’t want to do), providing insight from large, unstructured, unseen data and automation of simple, highly repetitive tasks. So, while AI is not a “magic bullet,” it offers genuine benefits, not just the reduction of “time spent in the process” but improvements to consistency, transparency, and mitigation of risk, all of which directly impact the top and bottom lines of your business.

To unlock these benefits, look for vendors that have a clear roadmap and will work with your organization to develop a successful rollout plan and deploy their AI+ELM solution to augment and enhance your capabilities.

It doesn’t solve our specific problems.

Transparency in the selection process will go a long way toward choosing a product that does solve those specific issues. Legal technology vendors should clearly lay out the purpose of their AI solution. What problems will it solve? What is the implementation process? What kind of support and training will they provide? What does the return on investment (ROI) look like? On the user side, legal departments must do their homework with stakeholders before they rush into buying a tech solution. Legal should have a clear picture of success and should come prepared with use cases to illustrate the desired outcome.

“Technology for technology’s sake” isn’t a solution. As much as AI can be used, there remains a bigger challenge of whether it will be used. Understanding the use case, implementation, and return on investment are especially important; bringing in nascent technology means you must have a strong change management process. Understanding how the organization will adopt the technology and including all key individuals — from the influencers to the naysayers — are critical to the successful rollout of AI.

With that type of transparency and communication, organizations can find the right vendor for their project needs. Remember this quote from business leader Andrew Shimek when embarking on the search:

“You shouldn’t chase AI in a vacuum,” one industry expert said in an Iltacon panel. “You should think about what are the problems that we have that need to be solved. And if AI is a critical tool that can help solve that faster and better, not at the expense of quality, let’s adopt it. But I think it’s use-case first and AI second—not AI in a vacuum.”

It doesn’t provide the data for success.

Nowadays, many AI solutions are trained out of the box, eliminating the need to collect enormous amounts of data to get started. Of course, to create a highly custom solution, you will need to spend time collecting data, training, and validating. This can be difficult and risky.

Like any digital transformation, you should ask yourself whether you are innovating to sustain the existing approach (by making it faster, more efficient, cheaper, etc.) or disrupting the existing one. Most innovation is centered around sustaining innovation — of which success comes through iteration, not giant leaps. “Don’t let best get in the way of better” is a great motto to remember.

Starting with out-of-the-box solutions that might not be an exact fit BUT offer a faster pathway to value and building internal support for such a transformation is a secure way of creating success, helping you learn, measure and prepare for more customized solutions in the future.

Embracing the paradigm shift

McKinsey’s State of AI survey in 2021 shows that AI adoption continues to grow with significant benefits; most respondents say that adopting AI has resulted in a demonstrable positive impact. In fact, a report from the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) that adoption of AI by legal teams doubled from 2020 to 2021 – from one in 10 teams to one in five.

Legal professionals everywhere are embracing the AI+ELM paradigm shift. On its most basic level, AI platforms can augment and improve both legal and business processes for corporate legal departments, law firms, contract professionals, and procurement teams. With the focused mission of helping business professionals get more work done faster, an AI engine can automate the existing repetitive, manual, and costly legal processes, enabling continuous learning and workflow improvements. The best intelligence platforms combine advanced AI techniques with workflow management to empower organizations with AI that not only finds and reports on things but does things for you.

The bottom line? While AI is not coming for lawyers’ jobs — and won’t be any time soon — the most innovative, forward-thinking legal departments recognize this paradigm shift and are acting to bolster their arsenal with AI-enabled workflow management solutions.

Learn how Onit’s ELM solutions can help your enterprise embrace this paradigm shift.

Modern Legal Tech for the Business of Law: A Future-Forward Playbook

Posted on October 31, 2022 by - Business Process Management, Digital Transformation

Technology is an enabler for businesses and practitioners who wish to differentiate, grow, and succeed. Here is a comprehensive blueprint of the most innovative and essential solutions Legal requires to evolve into a true business partner, impactful revenue generator, and corporate leader — for today, tomorrow, and years to come.

Today, the world seems to move at the speed of light.  Chatbots respond instantaneously to our online queries. True teleportation may not exist yet, but more than 15 million people are shuttled by rideshare companies daily. And somewhere between our first sip of coffee and setting our cell phone alarm for the next morning, over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every single day.

The last chapter of the multinational study* Enterprise Legal Reputation (ELR) Report highlights the remarkable potential for legal operations to be a change agent driving business results with the assistance of technology. While, on average, three in four (77%) legal departments have integrated some level of artificial intelligence (AI) into their day-to-day operations, nearly half admit their department is averse to change, citing budget issues (48%), perceived lack of tech competency (31%), and lack of time for learning new systems (25%) as barriers to tech adoption.

But digital technology is reinventing the way we live, play, and work — and businesses that invest in state-of-the-art tech will remain several steps ahead.

Embedding tech in Legal’s DNA

Fortunately, legal tech investment is at a record high: although none of us has a crystal ball to predict how the current macroeconomic market will affect corporate decision-making, two in three (67%) professionals do see tech budgets increasing.

Investing, however, is only the first step. The true cornerstone to modernized legal operations is ensuring tools are adopted. According to the ELR report, less than three in 10 (28%) respondents describe themselves as early adopters by nature, while another six in 10 (62%) classify as middle adopters.

In many legal departments, though, things simply “get in the way.” But inefficiency can damage both a legal department’s brand image and hold back the enterprise. The message is clear: embrace next-stage tech or get left behind.  

The “legal team of tomorrow” tool kit 

Here are the four areas of technology integral to the success of forward-thinking legal departments. 

1. Enterprise Legal Management (ELM)

A pioneering digital embodiment of the adage “work smarter, not harder,” the latest ELM solutions have transformed from systems of record to systems of engagement, encouraging true collaboration, operational transparency, and enterprise connection between Legal, its internal clients, and external stakeholders. ELM manages matters, e-billing, spend, and analytics, providing a single source of truth to capture every transaction, project, and matter. By extracting insights, developing metrics, and exposing trends that evaluate performance, ELM establishes benchmarks and streamlines workflows – yet less than half (48%) of ELR respondents currently utilize e-billing and other spend optimization solutions.  

2. Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM)

Contracts are at the core of revenue generation – and one of the biggest time-sucks for legal professionals, with two in five (40%) spending half of every workday, week, and quarter managing routine agreement work. But the latest CLM solutions offer self-service portals that can automate contract review and administer the data required to identify revenue recognition and acceleration opportunities. This enhanced visibility jumpstarts efficiency, reducing the length of the typical sales cycle by 24%, skyrocketing legal spend savings by 50%, and giving Legal up to 30% of its time back to focus on developing business acumen, delivering client advice, and working toward meaningful change. 

3. Data Governance & Cybersecurity

To become a corporate material influencer, Legal must think and act strategically — and doing so requires data. Data has emerged as the most instrumental decision-making tool, whether it involves tracking staffing needs, optimizing outside counsel spend, or driving vendor diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) efforts. Having visual analytics dashboards provides reporting fundamentals for initiating data-driven negotiations, rate benchmarking, and forecasting future projects and budgets as cost-efficiently and effectively as possible. Further, as data pools expand for corporations, the security scope and threat landscape will broaden — providing an opportunity for Legal to show greater impact as guardian of the enterprise.  

4. Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Imperative for speed and efficiency, artificial intelligence (AI) is not a single tool — it is a wide-ranging continuum of technological solutions and applications that can accelerate legal operations, virtualize legal expertise, and automate and augment business processes. AI can apply semantic analysis to find patterns in contracts, provide task recommendations, suggest revisions for standardized agreements like NDAs, and consult the company playbook for MSAs and SOWs, all while flagging any potential issues. AI-enabled invoice review can justify line items and enforce billing guidelines, and AI-assisted research can complete work in record time while elevating accuracy and precision.  

Legal’s eye on the horizon

While it’s true that it has never been Legal’s nature to be cutting-edge — not when the department is one established on being “by the book” and upholding precedents — there is no denying the legal tech revolution is here. With it comes a golden opportunity for Legal to evolve its role as a business protector and create significant impact when it comes to cost and operational efficiency, material growth, and collaborative cultural change.  

Technology is a catalyst for evolution. By seizing the innovative solutions available for legal operations, Legal can change the way it touches business in every realm — from revenue acquisition and EBITDA to competitive differentiation — and not only lead the evolution, but be the future.  

*Read the ELR Report to learn more about how legal professionals view their relationships with internal clients in comparison to the image enterprise employees have of their legal departments and how Legal can evolve to prove material impact and improve efficiencies across the business. 

What is Legal Matter Management?

Posted on October 26, 2022 by - Business Process Management, Digital Transformation

Legal Matter Management

It’s a term that is regularly used within the legal industry. It’s what lawyers and legal operations professionals want to optimize, and it’s the challenge that legal tech vendors are helping to solve. However, its scope is so broad that it’s easy to get confused as to what “legal matter management” is. To help address any uncertainty, we thought that we’d share our thoughts on the subject and set out what we believe legal matter management means and how technology can play a part. Starting with…

The Components of a Legal Matter

While matter management has received more attention with the growth in legal tools aimed at streamlining the process, it’s important to note that matter management is a discipline that has been around much longer than any software tool.

As the name suggests, matter management is the process of managing a legal matter (with or without technology). But what does this entail? To explain, it’s easiest to first look at the constituent elements of a legal matter.

  • Documents – Lawyers are called “paper pushers” for a reason. Every legal matter involves documentation of some description, from contracts and licenses to emails and letters. All this documentation needs to be centrally and securely stored and managed.
  • Knowledge – While lawyers are smart people, it’s perfectly natural they cannot have all the answers. They need quick access to quality and accurate know-how to support the delivery of any legal matter. Making this knowledge accessible when it is needed is a core component of matter management.
  • Collaboration – Law is a team sport. Every legal matter involves a broad range of different stakeholders – within the legal department and the wider business, as well as external to the organization. Efficient matter management requires seamless communication and collaboration between all parties.
  • Workflow – While many legal matters are complex and have their own nuances, most legal matters are quite formulaic. In other words, they follow a set sequence of phases and stages depending on the facts and circumstances of the matter.
  • Management – Matters are projects, so they need to be managed with the same diligence and attention. From scope, budgeting, and resourcing to task allocation, risk tracking, and status reporting, matters need to be carefully managed like any other to ensure delivery on time and within budget.
  • Spend – Tracking spend against budget is a key component of any matter where outside counsel or other legal service providers are instructed. It’s always vital to monitor how matter spend is performing against budget, keep track of work-in-progress (WIP) and accruals, as well as look out for issues that might adversely impact the budget and matter spend.
  • Reporting – In order to properly manage any legal matter or portfolio of matters, it’s necessary to have access to all the information about the relevant matters. Whether it’s information about status, risk, resourcing, spend, contracts, matters, etc., this information needs to be collated, available, and capable of being easily reportable.

Matter management simply involves the efficient coordination, organization, and delivery of all these core components for legal matters.

Micro vs Macro Matter Management

When people think of matter management, they are usually thinking about it at matter (micro) level, e.g., the management of a single matter. This will normally be the case for participants in particular matters who need visibility over matter activity and have access to matter-related documents and know-how.

However, legal departments are constantly handling large numbers of ongoing matters that also need to be managed and tracked at a portfolio (macro) level. This will particularly be the case for General Counsel, CLOs, and legal operations managers who need visibility, reporting, and insight across all legal matters. Therefore, it’s important to remember that matter management also includes matter portfolio management.

The Rise of Digital Matter Management

Unsurprisingly, digital matter management (DMM) involves the use of technology to support the management and delivery of legal matters. There are many software tools available that will help improve the discreet elements of a legal matter listed above, from contract assembly and document management systems to spend management and enterprise collaboration applications. While it’s a basic approach, even the use of tools like MS Excel and Dropbox is a form of digital matter management that works for many legal teams.

Currently, there is no shortage of software point solutions to help manage and streamline different components of a legal matter. However, the use of separate tech tools presents its own challenges – for example, integration difficulties, data silos, and inefficiency caused by context switching across applications. Legal departments are also under pressure from their organization’s IT teams to simplify and reduce the tech stack. For these reasons, there is a growing trend away from point solutions for matter management and towards single platforms that aim to optimize the full matter lifecycle in one central system. Therefore, in recent years, legal departments have been increasingly adopting full-suite cloud platforms.

What is Driving the Focus on Digital Matter Management?

Optimizing matter management has become a key focus for many legal teams in recent years, and they’re turning to technology to support this initiative. It’s part of a rapid digital transformation trend across legal departments that is being driven by a range of different factors, including, but not limited to:

  • Move to remote working, which requires greater focus and investment in legal productivity and workflow tools and easy access to know-how from anywhere and at any time
  • Pressure to be more cost-efficient as a legal function and deliver more value to their organizations
  • Growing global regulation and uncertainty causing increased legal workloads
  • More work being serviced in-house without legal department headcounts increasing significantly
  • Need to improve internal customer engagement as well as vendor selection and management
  • Maturing of legal operations and rise in dedicated legal technology strategies for corporate legal departments
  • Need for legal departments to demonstrate that they are a net contributor to the business

All these factors are leading many legal departments to seriously explore the adoption of matter management platforms to alleviate these pressures and help boost the value that they are delivering to their businesses.

5 Ways to Make Sure Your Legal Matter Management Implementation is a Success 

Posted on October 25, 2022 by - Business Process Management, Digital Transformation

So, you have carefully assessed your legal team’s challenges, mapped detailed requirements, completed a thorough assessment process, and selected your preferred matter management platform – now what next? Unfortunately, many legal teams stop here without properly thinking about how they will make the deployment and adoption of the new system a success. Bringing in a new matter management system takes time, money, and effort. Therefore, plans must be made to ensure that the new tool delivers the anticipated value and outcomes for your legal department and the broader organization.  

In the fourth and final part of our matter management blog series (read the first installments here: Part I, Part II, Part III), we explore five ways to ensure that your matter management implementation is a great success.  

1. Start Small, but Aim Big

This is less of a tangible step and more of a mindset. Many legal teams (energized by the selection process) get excited by the potential impact of a new legal matter management tool and want to roll it out as quickly and widely as possible. Other teams are immediately under pressure to prove their value to the organization – even if they are more cautious about the rollout. This leads to overambitious implementations that are almost doomed to failure before they begin. It’s great to have grand plans, but to succeed, it’s essential to build toward that success incrementally. For example, identify a small sub-team for the initial rollout or choose a larger group, limiting the initial deployed functionality. This allows you to put the necessary support in place, take feedback, measure impact, and learn valuable lessons before a broader rollout.

2. Bring Users on a Journey With You and Implement a Solid Training Program

While some users of a new matter management system may have been involved in the procurement process, many will not have been. You should not assume those users will understand the rationale for bringing in the new tool or be as enthused as the project team. One of the main reasons that new software implementations fail is down to end-user resistance or low adoption. Some put this down to people being stuck in their ways or technophobic, but often it is down to a lack of understanding and ‘buy-in’ on the part of the users. Therefore, make sure you explain to users why the new matter management system is being implemented, link it to their daily challenges, and showcase how it will benefit them personally. Users soon get on board when they realize a new tech tool will make their working life easier! Find more insights on how to secure legal technology adoption in this blog.

Another reason why user adoption of a new matter management system is often low has nothing to do with possible skepticism and resistance on – the part of users – it’s simply because users were not instructed on how to use the software. While many newer software platforms are built with an exceptional user experience and are intuitive, there is still a steep learning curve for any new software platform. It’s a simple fix! When looking for a new matter management system, ensure there is good user guidance and support built into the system, ensure you have coordinated thorough training for users, and build an associated knowledge base to deliver learning resources, keep users informed, and support new joiners. Ask your vendor to help support your training program, as any Customer-Success driven vendor will have pre-prepared materials and extensive experience onboarding other clients’ users. Also, consider seeking internal volunteers willing to champion the new system and provide support and training to new users.

3. Measure, Measure, Measure

Doubtless, part of the business plan when requesting a budget for a new matter management system included details about the value such a tool would bring to your team and organization. That value could have been in the shape of lower costs, increased revenues, reduced risk, etc. But once you implement a new system, how do you know if it delivers the desired impact? The answer is that you measure it. To measure the impact, you must see the status quo before implementing the tool. Therefore, make sure you have identified your baseline metrics before implementation. You might also consider them as your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). For example, if you’re interested in measuring how a matter management system reduces average matter cycle times, then make sure you know what average cycle times were before implementing the tool. After this, you need to track the metric to monitor impact and trends over time. Read more about typical KPIs in legal departments in this article. These steps will help you avoid the ‘implement and hope’ trap many teams fall into.

You also want to make sure you have a functioning feedback loop. No technology implementation is perfect the first time. It’s a very rare thing indeed for software to be deployed seamlessly without any issues or subsequent enhancement requests. To see the full value of a new matter management system, listening to your users and adapting accordingly is critical. Therefore, when implementing a new system, ensure you have created a user feedback mechanism and communicated this accordingly. Seek as much feedback as possible, monitor trends, and share the results amongst leadership and your users. Transparency is key! Treat implementation as the first step in the journey of your new tool – seek to learn and aim for continuous improvement. As a legal operations software provider, we’ve observed this many times; you may find new value from the tool and out-delivering on your forecasted ROI.

4. Create New Roles to Help Drive Success

Legal technology has evolved considerably over the last decade. Read more on the evolution of matter management here. Legal departments are looking beyond the traditional document and contract management tools and are now embracing solutions to support intelligent workflows, contract analysis, document assembly, decision automation, etc. Many new-generation tools are highly configurable and can be crafted to solve challenges or optimize certain processes. This requires people with both the legal and technical knowledge to “engineer” these solutions.

Furthermore, as legal department tech stacks grow, there is a requirement to manage the different solutions, maintain relationships with vendors, look for synergies, engage with central IT departments and ensure the legal team is supported and enabled from a technology perspective. Therefore, when thinking about implementing a new matter management system, why not consider bringing in additional roles, such as legal engineers and legal technology managers, to ensure its success? Don’t think that only lawyers can pick this up – legal technology is now a vocation in its own right! Many legal teams, therefore, increasingly bring experts from alternative professional backgrounds to the table. Use this opportunity to make your legal team even more agile and diverse.

5. Support Your New Users

Upfront training for a new matter management system isn’t enough on its own – it is also critical to make ongoing support available to users so that any technical or usability issues can be addressed quickly to reduce friction. The minute a user runs into friction, they will likely switch off the new system. This friction may be caused by not understanding certain functionality, performance issues, or even bugs in the system. Whatever causes the friction, systems and processes should be in place for a user to report their issue and obtain help and guidance. It’s critical to agree from the outset who within your organization will support your new matter management system. The best practice is not to assume it will be IT – as they only have limited resources and adding a new tool to their list may not be easy. Therefore, ensure you discuss support adequately before implementing a new system and agree on responsibility and internal SLAs, e.g., what issues are supported, by whom, and when support is provided. Then make sure your users know what support is available and how they reach it. Many sophisticated vendors also offer a support area within their application. This can anticipate many issues from the outset and avoid frustration and a high workload for your internal colleagues. Ask about this when selecting a vendor. Also, consider monitoring support data to help identify common issues – this can help improve training and support processes.

Let’s Summarize…

Implementing a new legal matter management system takes work. It takes careful planning and involves putting in place processes and support to ensure everyone is enabled to see the total value of the new tool and ensure that value is continually delivered throughout the lifecycle of the matter management platform. Starting with these five key tips will undoubtedly help keep you focused during your matter management implementation journey.

This is the final entry in a four-part series. Read the prior installments here:
Part I: The Definition of a Legal Matter and its Management,
Part II: 7 Key Components of a Full-Suite Matter Management System,
Part III: 7 Aspects In-House Teams Should Consider When Choosing a Matter Management Vendor

7 Aspects In-House Teams Should Consider When Choosing a Matter Management Vendor 

Posted on October 25, 2022 by - Business Process Management, Digital Transformation

This article is the third of our four-part blog series, focusing solely on matter management and its various aspects. If you have not yet read the first two articles, click here (Part I, Part II) to catch up. 

In part three, Carina Smolik-Fischer, director of product at BusyLamp (an Onit company) sums up 7 key aspects legal departments should consider when choosing the right matter management vendor. Here, you’ll get guidance on how to proceed once you have decided to purchase matter management software.

The decision has been made! You want to implement a matter management solution that makes your daily work more efficient, lets you work more effectively on matters, documents, legal intakes, and makes internal and external collaboration easier – congratulations on that! But now it’s time to ask yourself who is the right sparring partner for the job. Someone who assists you with scoping the project, supporting you with configuration, and onboarding your legal team to make this project a success. In my professional career, I gained profound experience with various matter management solutions. I found that some rules have proven true regarding finding the ideal matter management solution for a legal department. In the following, I would like to share the most valuable insights with you:

1. Your IT and Technology Matters

First and foremost, you must clarify with your IT and security department which requirements the new application must meet. IT will support you in checking if the matter management vendors meet important requirements like system provider and localization, data privacy, security, and certificates. BusyLamp meets a range of global certifications and regulatory and compliance standards, such as ISO 27001, GDPR, and more. Learn more about it here.

Next to the technical topics, support and provisions are vital, like license model, support model, updated deployment and maintenance, as well as integrations and quick implementation possibilities. Our data security checklist for in-house teams can help you keep the key IT considerations in mind.

And finally, costs and contract considerations like licenses and onboarding costs, contract duration, and payment terms are crucial. Our blog about hidden costs can help you to avoid underestimating the investment and to keep all costs in mind. This way, you can aim to select only the most suitable providers and shorten your vendors list.

2. Is the organization sustainable and scalable?

Besides the hard facts, soft skills should also drive your decision. When evaluating software vendors, take the time to dive into their backgrounds. Find out how long they have been active in the legal industry and whether they are currently growing or downsizing. Do they have a professional product and customer service team? Are they big enough and experienced enough to address your potential questions and concerns? Are they constantly developing the product and thus willing to grow with your future requirements? Make sure other customers are satisfied. Customer satisfaction is the best currency when predicting your project success.

3. Onboard your legal department early in the process

Get your legal department on board to drive user adoption. The project will only succeed if you have your colleagues by your side. This aspect should never be underestimated. We highly recommend you form a team with tech-savvy colleagues who represent your activities and know your department well. These can be lawyers, paralegals, assistants, and/or Legal Operations. Further recommendations on how to secure user adoption can be found within this blog article.

4. Request specific information from your potential matter management vendor

Let the team define its requirements. The best is using specific examples of their daily work and identifying what’s missing. Collect, classify and prioritize challenges and find intersection points. Which “pain points” are most relevant, which aspects are not so important, and which would be “nice to have”? Create a list and make it accessible to the team so that each team member feels included. Add key aspects your IT departments provide and collect all the data you need to make the right decision.

Once you have your list ready, share it with the potential providers and ask them to fill in their details. Use this sheet as preparation for the software presentation meeting.

5. Schedule Software Preparations and Work on a Practical Example

Once the day arrives, and you have invited vendors for the software presentation, it’s time to get down to business. Invite your team (the devil is in the details) and prepare your requirements list. Also, consider inviting a key user from the IT department to clarify all potential IT questions.

Take the chance and ask all the questions you and your team have. Ask the presenter to run through a specific use case completely. Make sure that the whole flow can be mapped within the application. That way, you will receive a realistic idea of whether the software suits your needs.

6. Ask for a Test Drive

Before committing to a new software solution, be sure to kick the tires. Most vendors offer a free trial to test features, benefits, and usability. Make sure the software contains the features you need, as well as the functionality. Use this critical phase to examine the software and put the provider through its paces. This is the only way for you to find out if it is a perfect match.

7. “It Takes Two to Tango”

At the end of the day, the relationship with the software solution representative is very important for mutual success. There must be clear communication and trust on both sides. Make use of a reliable and experienced single point of contact. You and your team spend plenty of effort defining your legal department’s goals and requirements, so it’s important that you don’t rush the last phase of your evaluation process and choose the most suitable matter management vendor wisely.

Read Part IV: 5 Ways to Make Sure Your Matter Management Implementation is a Success. 

7 Key Components of a Full-Suite Matter Management System 

Posted on October 25, 2022 by - Business Process Management, Digital Transformation

This article is the second of our four-part blog series focusing solely on matter management and various aspects. If you have not yet read the first article, click here to catch up. In part two, we will focus on the question of how full-suite digital matter management platforms help to optimize and streamline the management of legal matters.

In short, the answer is simple: If we take the core components of a matter, then we can easily deduce the benefits and efficiencies that matter management systems provide for legal departments. This boils down to: 

1. Central and Secure Document Management 

Matter management systems centralize document storage for matters and provide a secure location where important matter documents can be accessed. Essential document management functionality is normally present, including versioning, redlining, custom metadata, tagging, granular permissioning, etc. Integrations with MS Office and Google Workspace are often available, making editing and collaborating on documents quick and easy. Matter management tools also make it simple for documents and their content to be searched and found. Some matter management systems also offer specific contract management capabilities, such as e-signature integration and clause extraction for contract-related matters.

2. Discoverable Know-How

One benefit of managing matters in a single system is that all matter-related information and knowledge is collated in one location, a single source of truth. It also gives structure and taxonomy to that data. Good matter management systems harness this data and make know-how searchable and easily available in context when needed. Some matter management systems are actually utilizing AI to simplify and support knowledge delivery, connect data, help keep it up to date, and put it into context. Some matter management platforms leverage integrations with other systems to centralize data and make multiple sources searchable; others also embed chatbots and decision automation tools to deliver answers to specific questions and circumstances rather than just search results.

3. Efficient Communication and Collaboration

Following the pandemic and the rise in remote working, the best matter management platforms will now integrate with market-leading collaboration tools such as MS Teams. Good matter management platforms will also be systems of engagement (not just systems of record), enabling users from both within and outside the organization to collaborate on the delivery of matters. This is particularly helpful when legal teams are working with outside counsel. Communication should also be possible within the matter management platform, with social collaboration functionality like messaging, comments, and sharing. We are seeing a trend towards the “meet users where they work” model, so expect to see matter management tools integrating with more personal productivity and collaboration tools in the future.

4. Automated Workflows and Self-Service

Automating standardized workflows and reducing manual intervention is the key to making any legal process more efficient. Therefore, matter management platforms often provide workflow automation functionality. Process automation can range from standardized and fixed to fully configurable (often known as no-code automation). It can be used to optimize a wide range of matter processes, including notifications, legal intake, document automation, approval processes, risk escalation mechanisms, and contract lifecycles, to name just a few. One key benefit of automation is that it unlocks greater self-service. Legal teams are busy enough, so the more they can enable others to help themselves, the more they can focus on higher-value work. Matter management platforms are therefore being used to enable stakeholders within the business to instruct the legal team, generate their own documents, and access relevant guidance and know-how.

5. Clear Organization of Work

Delivering a legal matter involves the intricate coordination and management of resources, status, and risk to ensure delivery of the matter on time and on budget. Matter management systems often include tools to help with planning, resource allocation, and scheduling. From task management, work allocation, and project plans to capacity trackers, team calendars, and timelines – matter management tools help map the work necessary for the delivery of the legal matter and support the management of the resource to ensure proper execution of that matter. In some cases, matter management platforms will also include time-tracking features to enable legal teams to record the time they spend working on matters. However, project management isn’t just about resources, it’s about monitoring status changes, tracking risk, and ensuring transparent reporting. Matter management tools, therefore, provide tools that ensure complete transparency over matter activity. 

6. Transparent Spend Management

While many matters are dealt with in-house, a large proportion still require the support and input of outside counsel. Full-suite matter management tools often provide the functionality to help source legal service providers, create budgets, track spend, review invoices, enforce billing guidelines and run approval processes. Since spend is such a large element of any legal matter, it makes sense for spend management to form part of broader matter management systems – after all, it’s possible to derive more valuable insight when spend data is layered against other matter data. For example, comparing a law firm’s spend with its cycle times and outcomes can help determine whether a legal department sees value in its legal service providers.

7. Access to Data

The more matter activity conducted within matter management systems, the more useful data they hold. Whether the data relates to spend, status, resourcing, contracts, risk, or legal intake – it’s important to ensure that the data can be properly accessed and interrogated and that insights can be delivered quickly. Many matter management systems provide sophisticated reporting and analysis tools that enable matter data to be filtered and extracted. Alternatively, data can be visualized in charts and graphs within reporting dashboards or via connectors with tools such as Power BI. It’s important to note that many matter management systems go beyond simple reporting and now use data to predict future outcomes and spot trends. 

Putting it Into Practice

Matter management is a broad discipline that involves the efficient coordination and delivery of all aspects of a legal matter. Optimizing the matter management process is critical in the current landscape but may seem daunting given the scope of many legal matters; however, there are significant gains to be made by deploying technology solutions to streamline and support the management of legal matters. Instead of trying to stitch together different tech tools, look for full-suite matter management platforms that can enhance the entire matter lifecycle. These tools will help you start small but will provide the foundation for your team to scale into an organized, productive, and informed legal function! 

Read Part III of this series: 7 Aspects In-House Teams Should Consider When Choosing a Matter Management Vendor.