Category: Business Process Management

The Definition of a Legal Matter and its Management

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

This article is the first of our four-part blog series focusing solely on matter management and its various aspects and best practices. To kick off the series, we will be going back to the basics. In this article, we look at what matter management and legal matters are and why digital matter management is rising in importance.

Matter management is 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 trying to solve. However, its scope is so broad that it’s easy to get confused as to what “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 matter management means and how technology can play a part. 

Starting With the 7 Core 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.

1. Documents

Think of lawyers, and you’ll often conjure up images of huge contracts and files full to the brim with documents. 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.

2. Knowledge

While legal teams are smart people, it’s perfectly natural they cannot have all the answers. They need quick access to quality and accurate data and 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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 project to ensure delivery on time and within budget.

6. Spend

Tracking spend against budget is a key component any matter where outside counsel or other legal service provider is 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.

7. 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. Whilst 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.

Read Part II of this series: 7 Key Components of a Full-Suite Matter Management System.

Legal’s Golden Opportunity to Shine: Report Finds New Potential to Directly Impact Revenue Growth

Posted on June 28, 2022 by - Business Process Management, Digital Transformation

Chapter two of the Enterprise Legal Reputation (ELR) Report unveils new potential for legal departments to directly and positively impact material growth, operational efficiency, and cultural transformation. Here’s how Legal can be a top game-changer for its business.

There are two sides to every story.

Chapter one of the Enterprise Legal Reputation (ELR) Report — a third-party, multinational study of 4,000 enterprise employees — delved into the image of corporate legal teams through the eyes of enterprise employees and revealed a Perception Paradox: Although four in five (78%) employees consider Legal as outstanding protectors of the business who impart good advice, two in three (65%) have knowingly bypassed Legal, at least on occasion.

Chapter two of the ELR Report examines Legal’s perception of its own department by shining a spotlight on the parallels and perspectives of 500 corporate legal professionals from the United States (200 respondents), United Kingdom (100), Germany (100), and France (100). Is Legal aware of its brand image by its constituents? Does the department know what similarities and differences exist between their perceptions and those of its enterprise employees? And ultimately, how can Legal have greater impact on the materiality and growth of its business?

Similar attitude, legal latitude

When it comes to exploring the connection between Legal and its internal clients, nearly three in four (73%) respondents cite positive relationships. These figures are similar to the responses from enterprise employees in chapter one, where three in five (60%) reported harmonious partnerships. Legal believes its collegiality ranks highest with Finance (84%) and HR (79%), and employees reported the best collaboration with these departments as well, although at a slightly lower clip (62%). Further, nine in 10 (91%) corporate legal respondents believe they share exemplary interactions with their internal clients, and almost every corporate Legal respondent (95%) considers their department efficient in managing service requests, a number that wavered only slightly spanning the globe, with 98% in Germany, 96% in the United Kingdom, 95% in the United States, and 91% in France.

Why, then, do three in every four Legal employees feel the strength of their connection with internal clients is solid when less than two in five enterprise employees concur? Despite Legal believing it has “good” or “very good” relationships with IT (78%), Procurement (76%), Sales (74%) and Marketing (73%), the feeling is different from the enterprise employee perspective, sitting at just 38% for IT, 37% for Procurement, 43% for Sales and 37% for Marketing.

While Legal being confident about their relationships is to be commended, these inconsistencies in awareness represent an incongruity and potential obstacle — also known as the Iceberg Effect.

Part of the issue in differing levels of perception could be taking an outside-in view: Since Legal sets the standards for what needs to be accomplished in its department, Legal innately presumes it is accomplishing what needs to be done. And, in fact, many legal teams are doing an extraordinary job. In chapter one, enterprise employees were quick to note how Legal excels at negotiation, procuring vendors and services, and impacting the corporate brand.

Yet what this variance also indicates is the presence of untapped potential. Legal has the capability to be more than a risk mitigator and compliance officer; to do more than review, manage, and sign contracts. This is a chance for Legal to command a place at the table as a transformational change agent and business influencer impacting topline revenue, innovation, competitive differentiation, brand, and corporate culture.

Steering clear of the Iceberg Effect

When it comes to impacting the business where it matters most, Legal is in safe and steady waters supporting Sales and the revenue acquisition process. In fact, nowhere is Legal’s ability to steer the ship clearer than here: More than half (56%) of enterprise employees say Legal kickstarts sales and revenue operations, with 48% citing Legal’s acceleration of deal cycles. Nearly seven in 10 (68%) legal professionals also believe they help Sales effectively close urgent deals, a sentiment that skyrockets to an incredible 84% in Germany.

There can be no revenue recognition until contracts are signed, though, and with two in five legal respondents (40%) spending four to five hours – at least half of every business day – reviewing and managing contracts, Legal expresses a definite need for speed and modernization. Nearly half of respondents (47%) claim their current technology is insufficient. But optimizing with automated tools powered by the combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and contract lifecycle management (CLM) is the key to advancing the entire contract process, from document generation and redlining to e-signature and finalization. This acceleration can pilot faster decision-making on how to push contracts through review cycles, renewals, and negotiation, scaling the speed and growth of revenue generation (44%) as well as mergers and acquisitions (23%).

Legal’s role in materially impacting its business

While the crux of a business’ success may be defined by its sales and revenue, Legal holds the power to influence other functions across the enterprise, too. There can be no sales without a valuable product or service, and more than three in five (61%) legal professionals believe they play a prime role in positively impacting their businesses’ abilities to innovate and differentiate competitively by protecting company patents and intellectual property (IP).

Even beyond the scope of innovation and ideas, it is people who make up the atomic units of a business. Corporate culture and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are fundamental to operational efficiency and growth. Fortunately, four in five (80%) enterprise employees view Legal as a great partner for procuring vendors and services, and more than half of respondents (52%) worldwide report their departments and companies are now prioritizing vendor diversification. Yet another Legal priority is improving data security, with one in three employees (33%) highlighting the importance of cyber risk management.

It is within these forward-thinking sectors – DEI and data privacy — that Legal can uncover its formula for future success and evolve from a transactional, back-office brand into a visible business influencer, vanguard of innovation, and advocate for diversity and inclusivity. By doing so, Legal can pivot the Perception Paradox and melt the Iceberg Effect, connecting more deeply with its internal clients, ramping up material growth and operational excellence, and expanding its image as guardian of the enterprise into an even more significant role as protector.

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.

Guardian of the Enterprise: A Look Into Legal’s No.1 Role as Business Protector

Posted on June 23, 2022 by - Business Process Management, Digital Transformation

The legal department is viewed as an outstanding protector of the business and remarkable advisor. The perception of Legal as a business partner is not quite as stellar. What can Legal do to reconcile these images and come out on top as both?

Bulwark. Safeguard. Defender.

With 77% of enterprise employees around the world rating their legal departments as talented negotiators and almost half (47%) believing Legal positively affects forward-thinking innovation, there are many different perceptions of Legal.

However, the Enterprise Legal Relationship (ELR) Report – a third-party, multinational study of 4,000 enterprise employees and 500 corporate legal professionals spanning the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany – revealed that, far and away, the number-one image that enterprise employees have of Legal is as a protector of the business, its assets, and its people.

Guardian of the enterprise

Legal is responsible for ensuring the compliance of a company’s actions, so it’s no surprise that the department is seen first and foremost as an authority figure both expected and enabled to protect the corporate mission. When one envisions the responsibilities of various functions within an enterprise along a spectrum between protection and promotion, Legal – as opposed to Sales and Marketing – falls soundly on the side of protection. Overall, the perception of Legal around the globe is primarily positive with three out of five respondents (60%) citing good relationships — no doubt due in large part to the protection the department imparts to the enterprise as a whole.

Two separate perceptions

When it comes to Legal, however, there is also a Perception Paradox: While Legal is highly respected as the protector of the business, three out of four enterprise employees (73%) do not consider Legal a good business partner.

How can Legal be lauded as protectors of the business when many of its internal clients don’t see it as a good business partner?

It all comes down to perception. Among enterprise employees, protection and trust appear to be two separate perceptions. In fact, 49% respondents globally describe Legal as “inflexible” and 59% call Legal “inefficient.” Additionally, one in 10 – and as many as one in five in the United States and United Kingdom – voiced concerns that Legal’s abundance of caution as protectors have extended the time to close and win deals, slowing and negatively impacting sales cycles.

That said, this is a cross to bear that shouldn’t entirely rest on the albeit strong shoulders of Legal. If Legal is indeed viewed as and expected to be the protector of the business, but those same employees believe that Legal hinders business from moving forward, it might explain why two out of three respondents (65%) admit to having bypassed the Legal departments and its policies in the past, at least on occasion.  

So then how is Legal supposed to act as the very protectors they are regaled as being?

The future of Legal: protector and partner

 Where Legal shines is in matters ensuring that accountable decisions are made and inherent risk is mitigated: patents, trademarks, and intellectual property (92%) and regional and global-specific matters (89%) top the list. Yet Legal has the potential to evolve its perceptions and become not only the intellectual “head” of an enterprise, but much more of its heart.

Employees want, need, and deserve to feel secure in an organization.  As a true protector, Legal can be empowered to let internal clients know Legal is “with them.” By freeing up time from mundane tasks with state-of-the-art automation, Legal will have an opportunity to contribute more collaborative support to its internal clients, earning greater trust and transforming into a truly valued business partner as well as the protector of the business they always have been.

Assist legal teams in better understanding their brand image by downloading ELR Report Chapter 1.

3 Ways to Up Legal’s Approachability Factor

Posted on May 29, 2022 by - Business Process Management, Digital Transformation

As many as 65% of enterprise employees bypass the legal department on occasion. Here’s how to turn that around and become the true leader Legal is meant to be.

Modern life teems with sigh-worthy moments: dodgy WiFi when you’re on deadline, your phone battery running out of juice with no place to recharge, the dreaded “You have two more password attempts before being locked out.”

But would it surprise you to learn that, for enterprise employees, dealing with Legal can also sometimes feel a little bit the same? The Enterprise Legal Relationship (ELR) Report – a third-party, multinational study of 4,000 enterprise employees and 500 corporate legal professionals across the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany – revealed that only 35% of respondents always engage with Legal on matters.

Even more astonishing, an inverse relationship exists: the fewer the transactions with Legal, the more positive the relationship. Employees from the United Kingdom, who tend to engage with the legal department most frequently, report the poorest interactions, whereas employees in France cite perhaps the best relationships with Legal, yet are most likely to bypass Legal.

It doesn’t have to be this way. These findings present a major opportunity for Legal to improve its approachability factor. In fact, the department has the chance to jumpstart efficiency, impact materiality, and grow the innovation and culture of the business in unprecedented ways.

Increase the percentage of employees that engage Legal by:

  1. Cutting the perception of red tape

By and large, employees believe Legal is doing its job – and exceedingly well! But for the enterprise employees who do admittedly bypass Legal on occasion, 36% say they feel the department has a tendency to sometimes be overly bureaucratic.

Legal excels at patents, trademarks, and intellectual property (IP), according to 92% of respondents, as well as matters involving HR issues (88%). But as business partners, nearly half (49%) claim that Legal can be “too process-oriented,” causing 53% of employees in even the most-compliant United States to occasionally circumvent legal processes. And in the other nations surveyed, those numbers skyrocket, to 63% in the United Kingdom, 68% in Germany, and 73% in France.

Legal is typically process-oriented – that’s how the department protects the business. This is a chance to examine existing policies and forge new ones that may reduce any unnecessary inefficiencies.

  1. Accelerating response times

Every internal client knows that mitigating enterprise risk is Legal’s essential purpose. Yet nearly half of global respondents worry that Legal’s abundance of caution while doing so could potentially damage sales cycles, affecting deal close rates (43%), missed earnings (35%), and even stock price drops and valuation loss (14% each, respectively). Further, many employees (41%) feel that Legal is not as responsive since many legal operations departments have been working remotely or on a hybrid schedule as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

It’s impossible to work well together if a salient entity like Legal even occasionally feels absent from the enterprise. But introducing methods to improve channels of cross-enterprise communication as well as automation and artificial intelligence (AI) tools to rapidly accelerate Legal’s response time can dramatically prevent Legal’s chance of being bypassed.

  1. Embracing flexibility and inclusivity

Trust has a way of naturally trickling downward. Half of all employees (49%) – and three out of five (58%) in France – believe Legal can sometimes be a bit too rigid. If employees feel that a situation is inflexible, they may be far less likely to interact, for fear of being rejected. However, as one ethical compass of the enterprise, Legal also has a unique and distinct advantage in its proverbial back pocket: the ability to transform company culture by bearing the torch for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and protecting the business’ atomic unit – data.

Knowledge is power

Legal always puts itself in the line of fire for a business. But how can you protect the business if two-thirds of your internal clients occasionally evade your oversight?

Bypassing legal is no way to reach your enterprise’s desired destination. Arm yourself, your department, and your team with this knowledge – the knowledge to automate both workflows and processes for greater efficiency and effectiveness between departments; to be a business partner that accelerates the cycle of winning deals; and to become more involved, approachable, and collaborative – so that employees always abide by Legal’s policies. This is how Legal becomes a leader. And, by doing so, Legal will secure a spot as a key differentiator for cost efficiency, operational excellence, and revenue generation.

Find out more about how to prevent your legal team from being bypassed by downloading ELR Report Chapter 1.

The ELR Report is a third-party, multinational study of 4,000 enterprise employees and 500 corporate legal professionals across the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany intended to showcase relationship dynamics and perceived image between corporate legal teams and enterprise organizations.

Which Internal Teams Work Best with Legal?

Posted on May 23, 2022 by - Business Process Management, Digital Transformation

Trusted relationships are everything.

According to Lord Richard Layard, today’s foremost happiness researcher and program director of the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics, what matters most in business is what matters most in life: cultivating a sense of belonging and purpose bolstered by meaningful connection.

Any team, be it Sherlock and Watson or the Super Bowl champion Los Angeles Rams, possesses a shared objective, goal, or destination. Every player must be invested in doing the work needed to arrive at that pinnacle. And each individual must feel a connection with their colleagues or teammates to want to achieve that success together.

It’s no different for business teams. If you’ve ever wondered how you can enhance your relationship with internal clients, you aren’t alone. It turns out the status of the relationship with Legal can differ by department.

The Enterprise Legal Relationship (ELR) Report – a third-party, multinational study of 4,000 enterprise employees and 500 corporate legal professionals across the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany – found that the majority (77%) of enterprise employees believe that Legal is exceptional at negotiating on the behalf of their companies. However, less than one in five (19%) feels Legal prioritizes its internal clients, and the status of those relationships can vary across the enterprise.

So what accounts for this disconnect among departments? And what can be done to change it?

Satisfied with safeguarding

The ELR Report revealed that enterprise employees believe Legal’s charter is to protect the company, assets, and people. Additionally, 46% of all global employees consider Legal a trusted advisor. It makes sense, then, that the more liability-prone departments have a higher rate of positive engagement with Legal: Around the globe, 62% of employees from Human Resources (HR) and Finance note positive relations with Legal.

Even more impressively, seven in 10 U.S. respondents are pleased with Legal’s interactions with HR. Employees in France cite collegiality with both HR and Finance at 66%. In the United Kingdom, 64% tout a good working relationship with HR; 62% say the same of Finance, whereas in Germany – which reports the lowest rate of satisfaction with Legal — half (50%) are content with HR and 58% with Finance.

Feeling the strain

For Sales, IT, Marketing and Procurement, however, those numbers plummet – only 43% of global respondents say Legal’s interactions with Sales are positive, and that figure drops to 38% for IT and 37% for both Marketing and Procurement.

U.K. employees cite satisfaction with Sales, Marketing, and IT at just 35%. And in France – where, by and large, legal teams are viewed as uncompromising – only 29% consider Legal to share a decent connection with Procurement; 33% with IT.

Similarly, 40% of U.S. enterprise employees call Legal’s relationships with Sales and IT positive. Marketing comes in lower at 38%. Data are not much improved for these departments in Germany, where less the half have good interactions with Sales (49%) and IT (43%), and even fewer do with Marketing (37%) and Procurement (38%).

Looking in the mirror

Legal manages various types of matters including contracts, negotiations, lawsuits, and issues of compliance. Since HR and Finance are required to follow protocol – they are not supposed to deviate from “the book,” and the rules that Legal sets and abides by to safeguard the company – it’s only natural that they find dealing with Legal easier.

Meanwhile, Sales, Marketing, IT, and Procurement – departments that are, by their nature, meant to push the envelope to innovate, hit numbers, and modernize – report frustration working with Legal. As it is their responsibility to assertively grow and advance the enterprise in avant-garde and creative ways, they may feel stymied and stonewalled by the very parameters put into place to protect the business.

A call for change

Still, it doesn’t have to be this way. People are a company’s most valuable asset. And with the core of any business a collection of both internal and external relationships, the more connected the enterprise, the more successful it will be. For the sake of business growth and efficiency, Legal can seize this moment to become a more active partner, to nurture more collaborative alliances, to enhance relationships across the business – and to ultimately connect to the enterprise as a whole, now more than ever.

Take the next step in elevating your internal working relationships. Your business is counting on you.

Learn more by reading ELR Report Chapter 1.

The ELR Report is a third-party, multinational study of 4,000 enterprise employees and 500 corporate legal professionals across the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany intended to showcase relationship dynamics and perceived image between corporate legal teams and enterprise organizations.

Leading from the Front: The Transformative Landscape of Legal Operations (CLOC 2022 Recap)

Posted on May 22, 2022 by - Business Process Management, Company News and Events

The annual Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) Global Institute 2022 just wrapped up in Las Vegas, gathering the most innovative and disruptive legal professionals from around the world for the event of the year. It’s been a long time since we’ve been able to meet everyone in person and an absolute honor to sponsor the first in-person CLOC in two years. The networking was amazing and the learnings were invaluable. Here’s a recap of our week at CLOC.

CLOC 2022 in 5 key takeaways: There opportunity for meaningful change is here

  1. Embrace the connected enterprise. Legal departments do not operate in a silo. While it’s no secret that they are well-positioned to operationalize efficiencies, investing in relationships with other departments can have a significant impact on enterprises at large. Legal operations professionals benefit from learning the importance of building trust and relationships cross-departmentally, especially with IT, to deliver value and use that value as currency.
  2. Plan for workshop efficiency in your department. Legal is seeing many of the same trends that other departments face (increased costs, higher workloads, effects of inflation / post-Covid world) and need to be nimble in order to scale. Driving efficiencies and containing costs are two key reasons legal operations is important and growing so quickly. Its impact now and in the future is almost like a tidal wave hitting legal departments across the industry, but in the best of ways.
  3. Think of legal as a value creation center in the company. We’ve all heard about “running legal like a business.” Legal departments, great and small, no longer have the option of saying “no” to the concept of cutting-edge legal operations. We need to connect processes and the tech stack in a way that drives value rather than just reducing spend. When technology solution providers are aligned with core competencies, the legal department’s success already has a running head start.
  4. Meaningful change is needed in DE&I, CSR and ESG. Legal operations should be leading from the front on these programs. We need to infuse competence, compassion, courage, and tools to help each individual drive this transformation. Early diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts create a richer candidate pool of potential employees and result in significantly more diverse hires, but more work needs to be done in this area to get it right.
  5.  Defend your spend with data. Innovative legal operations leaders are pivoting their approach to managing outside counsel spend by using data to validate their spend and drive efficiency and savings. AI and machine learning present new opportunities to help corporate legal teams make better strategic decisions. Using legal business intelligence like comparative analytics and benchmarking, they are going beyond basic reporting to put spend in context with market insights. Market and panel benchmarking, firm report cards and comparative analytics can help strategically manage spend – and expectations from both firms and internal stakeholders.

CLOC 2022 in 5 quotes: Celebrating the resilience of the legal ops community

Quote 1

 

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) has been a hot topic of conversation since last year and we’re not surprised to see it come up in this year’s CLOC Institute. Consilio’s session on how law firms and in-house teams can work collaboratively to measure, report, and improve law firm diversity showed that it’s no longer just a talking point; it’s also an action point.

Data is crucial to inform our conversations with law firms on their diversity. It’s harder to backtrack from a promise if it can be measured. However, measurability arose in question across many DE&I metric panels: How does legal ops handle the situation when attorneys choose not to disclose diversity status? The answer? “That’s a conversation you need to have with them. Why don’t they?”

It’s all about having these intentional conversations early on. While it may seem uncomfortable, legal operations has the power and flexibility to ask probing questions about underrepresented attorneys as clients of outside counsel. Legal ops also has the unique ability to share best practices they see their organization and other outside counsel practicing. “We don’t want to ask anything of our outside counsel firms that we’re not committed to doing ourselves.”

The takeaway? Remember it’s a marathon, not a sprint. To enact lasting change in the industry, we’re all working together to improve and support DE&I objectives with clear visibility into the data.

Quote 2

Working collaboratively has shown to be of great importance, especially when remote and hybrid workplaces are a lot more commonplace for legal ops now. In this session, we partnered with our parent company Onit to show how the foundation of communication begins with trust. Trust that your team will deliver value to the individuals you work with, to other departments, and to the overall business. That trust will pay off unexpected dividends, whether your team is part of a scaling business or a well-established enterprise.

That trust also connects back to any initiatives you bring up to the wider organization. Connecting back to our previous quote on DE&I, having that trust means that legal is at a prime position to mold the department and organization goals. Legal already has a reputation for being an unapproachable authority figure in the organization. When we meet, connect, and share some humanity, stopping and listening allows us to better meet the needs of the people we’re working with.

The takeaway? Make establishing a good working relationship with other departments a priority. We’re all here to ensure the business flourishes. You protect the business from external risks better when you’re not facing avoidable internal strife.

Quote 3

 

While this specific session may have been addressing contract legal management (CLM) users, we can apply this mindset to any technology solution. Like this attendee said, technology will never solve your problems if you don’t have a clear understanding of how it will improve your processes. And it seems like at least half of legal ops professionals are missing that essential understanding part if we take this audience as a microcosm of the larger community.

Would you use a screwdriver to hammer down a nail? Probably not (unless you’re desperate and don’t have anything better on hand at the moment). Likewise, technology is a tool at the end of the day. Whether or not it’s being used effectively all depends on the user. In legal speak, that’s you and your team. Having fancy technology to address your pain points might seem great at first, but it’s a bandage solution in the end. Kind of like forcing a circular peg into a square hole.

You wouldn’t start building a house without understanding exactly how loose wood, stone, and metal end up becoming a solid structure capable of withstanding wear and tear. So why shouldn’t your approach to bringing on new legal technology be the same?

The takeaway? Understanding your processes is key. From there, you and your team have the ability to convince others on why you need technology to improve them and how you will go about doing it.

Quote 4

 

On the topic of technology, we think we can accurately predict the trend for the rest of the year. The top priority for current and future transformative legal ops initiatives is digitizing their processes. That dominated every other topic at a whopping 54% in this panel, beating out the next emphasis on spend management by 34%. The need for technology has continued to increase in the face of a changing workforce and work environment.

This is fantastic news, especially in an industry that has traditionally been slow to embrace change. It’s not an exaggeration to say that law firms are still using spreadsheets to track their data even if many law firms are phasing into more secure tech solutions. However, what exactly does digitization of processes mean? An audience member raised an excellent counterpoint. What are the outcomes you want to drive by digitizing processes? And which processes? We know that one legal team’s answers will differ from another legal team. After all, no journey is exactly the same. But wanting to digitize processes is a great sign that many legal departments are ready to take the next step of maturing their legal operations function.

The takeaway? Legal technology is not a fad.

Quote 5

Why do we as in-house legal professionals do what we do? We’re here to facilitate risk for sure. But another powerful ability we have is enacting change on a scale beyond our departments. With spending power over outside counsel and protection over the business from external risk, in-house legal teams are in a unique position to become agents of change.

And how do we do that? As this session shows, we flip the script. We’re not here to be the heroes of the story. We’re here to ensure the end user is the hero. The end user can be anyone: the finance department your team is collaborating with to manage outside counsel, the wider organization you’re serving and its goals, or even the clients of whatever your organization provides. We’re the special tool they leverage. By empowering the end user, we enact change.

The takeaway? The legal operations community continues to innovate. Our ability to enact change as legal ops professionals are only limited by our imagination. You can always try again with a new perspective.

The Top 5 Opportunities for Legal to Work Better with Internal Clients

Posted on May 9, 2022 by - Business Process Management

We live in a dynamic age. With the business landscape constantly transforming, legal operations is at a crossroad of material challenges and growth opportunities — from revenue generation and operational efficiency to innovation and corporate culture.

The good news? According to the Enterprise Legal Relationship (ELR) Report, nearly four in five (78%) enterprise respondents view Legal first and foremost as stellar business protectors. But what may come as a shock is that only 19% of employees believe that Legal prioritizes its internal clients. What’s more, only 39% of US employees see Legal as a good business partner — and, spanning the globe, that number plummets to just 24% in Germany and 16% in France.

The Top 5 Opportunities for Legal to Work Better with Internal Clients

There are five ways Legal can initiate, develop, and maintain trusting business partnerships within the enterprise:

  1. Shed the image of the “No” Police

It’s no surprise that Legal is not known to go rogue. Legal must play by the rules; the specific purpose of Legal is to establish and execute clear boundaries. However, the ELR report revealed that three in five respondents believe Legal can complicate matters with red tape, citing Legal as overwhelmingly bureaucratic.

This image of Legal as bottlenecks contributes to fracture: 10% of UK employees deem Legal as uninvolved, one in five claim that Legal is an unwilling business partner, and 19% of enterprise employees worldwide do not even believe that Legal even understands their needs.

But there is always time and room for change. Rather than saying no outright, Legal can act as a more consultative partner and offer alternatives that appease both parties.

  1. Quicker turnaround times

While 3 in 5 reported a matter of days as the average time for Legal teams to respond to requests, the ELR showed that at times inquiries can take weeks to be acknowledged, especially in the United States, Germany, and France — leading a similar 60% of respondents worldwide to perceive Legal as inefficient.

Ever-increasing workloads, chronically understaffed teams, and the constant mantra to “do more with less” can put a strain on both people and processes, hampering the ability to prioritize legal asks in a timely fashion, which in turn can impede the flow of business.

To turn this perception around, legal leaders can examine the current process for legal service requests (LSRs) to identify potential bottlenecks and then implement measures and technology that enable a faster response to inquiries.

  1. Embrace WFH 

While the capability to work remotely proved a blessing for most businesses during the height of COVID-19, 61% believe that Legal has been less responsive since the work-from-home (WFH) trend began. In fact, 38% of enterprise organizations say that Legal was more responsive prior to the pandemic.

With more than half of legal teams continuing to work at home full-time or on a hybrid schedule, this transition has presented novel challenges for collaboration and support – a sentiment magnified in the United Kingdom and France, where 42% of respondents reported a perceived slowdown by Legal.

Legal can set expectations for responsiveness by adding proactive communication around how or why processes may have changed in addition to offering direct solutions for adjusting to new working environments.

  1. Increase visibility

Similarly, while most respondents believe that Legal is visible and transparent regardless of their working location, two in five regard Legal as less so today than the department has been in the past.

Virtual and remote engagement, when compared to face-to-face office connections and real-time visibility, may understandably diminish approachability, which could in turn affect the resolution of legal issues and impact operational efficiency for a multitude of matters.

To increase visibility across the enterprise, legal departments may want to participate in company-wide communications to provide status updates into key initiatives or projects. Frequent and proactive touchpoints go a long way in promoting transparency.

  1. Encourage flexibility

Half of all global enterprise employees — 49%, and as high as 58% in France — believe that Legal creates an inflexible corporate culture. This perceived inflexibility can prohibit future collaboration, growth, and Legal’s fundamental role in the enterprise.

There is a colossal level of scrutiny on Legal and the department’s obligation to not only mitigate risk, but to set the standard for new and acceptable risks; this is true. The ELR Report found that Legal has a direct and positive impact on various functions from sales, revenue, and renewals to the corporate brand, R&D, and innovation. Legal can use this opportunity to lead from the front and transform beyond a traditional back-office function.

A Light at the End of the Tunnel

“The ELR Report reveals a glaring reality check on how Legal is perceived by their enterprise organizations,” Onit CEO Eric Elfman said. “It’s time for Legal to evolve in impactful ways — their businesses are counting on them.”

Evaluate and implement cutting-edge technology, like workflow automation and artificial intelligence (AI) tools. Improve efficiency and reduce rigidity. Be bold and step up as a business partner like never before.

Now is the time to evolve.

Get your head start on a legal evolution by downloading ELR Report Chapter 1.

The ELR Report is a third-party, multinational study of 4,000 enterprise employees and 500 corporate legal professionals across the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany intended to showcase relationship dynamics and perceived image between corporate legal teams and enterprise organizations.

Your New CLM Tool: 6 Unexpected Things to Consider Before You Buy

Posted on March 17, 2022 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

The challenges around finding a good CLM tool continue to occupy the minds of CLOs and GCs. In a recent survey, 70% said they are looking to improve their existing contract management software, which is not surprising since a sophisticated, enterprise CLM tool can accelerate revenue, reduce risks and provide consistency and standardization.

When it comes to implementing technology to help handle your contracts, all contract software is not created equal. The following list shares key characteristics you should look for in a CLM tool.

A CLM Tool for All Phases of Contract Management

Getting a deal inked is only half of the process. Many contract management systems focus heavily (or even solely) on the pre-signature contracting phase. This is understandable since that phase requires a lot of heavy lifting in terms of workflow, collaboration and communications – often across multiple departments.

However, as corporate legal departments know, the contract lifecycle doesn’t end when the papers are signed. The contractual obligations must be managed to ensure critical dates, times and deliverables are met and accounted for. CLM technology that accomplishes this includes capabilities such as:

  • Batch review – Extract data from multiple legal documents at once for due diligence, applying contract updates or importing legacy contracts.
  • Repapering – Identify which contracts need repapering due to regulatory, policy or commercial changes in less than five seconds.
  • Contract abstraction – Identify key legal clauses, terms and details in documents for easy analysis and management.
  • Audit compliance – Automate large-scale legal contract review during regulatory changes and export relevant details to .CSV reports and in-document notes.
  • Due diligence – Automate the batch review of contracts for routine legal due diligence, making time for higher-value tasks.
  • Legacy contract migration – Analyze legacy contract metadata rapidly to extract critical dates, terms and clauses to assist in the import.

Unlimited Users

Contracts reach far beyond legal and across the enterprise, including sales, marketing, HR, procurement and more. All depend on contracts to move the company forward. Yet, many CLM tools require pricy licenses for each user – a situation that prioritizes dollars rather than speed, collaboration and productivity. With unlimited licenses, any stakeholder involved in a contracting process can access the system for self-service, submissions, updates and more.

Pre-Trained AI for Your CLM Tool

Historically, training AI is a time-consuming and costly endeavor that requires specialized AI-specific skills and resources. It’s understandably an endeavor that corporate legal departments are equipped to handle.

Your CLM tool should come with out-of-the-box functionality with pre-trained AI, and it should incorporate thousands of existing clauses created by legal experts. This means you can start using it – and seeing its value – right away.

Independence from Legacy Products

Since contract management challenges extend across an enterprise, some popular CLM solutions are reliant on specific legacy products or platforms. In this context, the contract management feature may be an addition with limited functionality bolted to a system built for an entirely different business use. This can present challenges, as it limits contract management potential. Beyond limited functionality, you may not be able to use or have access to the product (or have to pay for additional licenses). Additionally, the legacy product may require you to invest time in implementing and training to understand it beyond the contract management functionality. A better solution is to have a CLM tool independent of legacy products – a full-fledged system robust enough to handle the challenges of contract management on an enterprise level.

CLM Tool Integrations

Your CLM should work where you work, meaning integrations are vital. Most contract stakeholders – including lawyers – rely on Microsoft Word for contracts, which means you want to make sure your CLM system has a Microsoft Word add-in. The same is true for any other tools you use heavily or are used in your company. You want to make sure your CLM solution offers seamless integrations, so you don’t have to switch back and forth between solutions or resort to data entry to continue the information flow. This includes integration with existing legal systems such as matter management, spend management, legal holds, legal service requests, analytics and more.

Proven Expertise and Support

Never underestimate the value of your experience with a CLM technology provider. When you’re purchasing something as crucial as CLM, you want an expert sales representative who can understand your needs, ensure your CLM solution is a good fit and offer services and partners that can help with configuration, implementation and support.

The right CLM solution can mean significant savings in cost, better use of your staff’s time, increased efficiency and more. Schedule a demonstration with us today to learn more about how Onit CLM can work for you.

Legal AI Technology: How Its Adoption Leads to Real-World Results

Posted on March 15, 2022 by - Business Process Management, Digital Transformation

Legal AI technology, along with other forms of AI, was once the stuff of science fiction. However, artificial intelligence (AI) has entrenched itself in the mainstream. While there are plenty of myths and misconceptions floating around about what AI is and what it can do, one thing is clear: AI gets results.

That’s why more and more corporate legal departments and legal ops professionals are turning to AI-powered solutions to boost efficiency, cut costs and more. As the year goes on, one of the top legal operations trends we expect to see is companies capitalizing on the practical, real-world results that AI can provide.

The Prevalence of Legal AI Technology

We’ve come a long way from the early days of AI, which were largely dominated by chess games and robot movies. Today, AI is present in nearly every aspect of business, with legal AI technology serving as an integral part of how modern legal ops teams function along with the benefits of a contract management system.

There’s no question that general AI adoption among companies of all sizes is on the rise. McKinsey’s State of AI in 2021 Report found that 56% of survey participants across multiple industries adopted AI in 2021, up 50% the previous year. This adoption significantly impacted companies’ bottom lines, with 27% of respondents saying they could trace at least 5% of earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) to AI.

Corporate legal departments are part of this upward trend. According to CLOC State of the Industry Reports, in-house AI usage increased from 12% in 2019 to 22% in 2021. Not surprisingly, the AI legal software market is predicted to grow by more than 28% between 2021 and 2026.

AI Results in Action

AI is a technology that learns, reasons and acts for itself. It can make decisions that usually require a human level of expertise, meaning it can help lawyers and legal ops professionals anticipate problems and address issues as, or even before, they arise.

AI is ideal for data-intensive tasks because it identifies patterns, learns from them, and generates insights faster and more accurately than humans. Legal work is increasingly made up of data-driven tasks, meaning more legal ops professionals should be turning to AI. A perfect example is contract management.

A study showed that legal contract review software makes new users immediately 51.5% more productive and roughly 33% more efficient by conducting first-pass contract review, making redlines and delivering a contract risk profile, all in a matter of minutes. If you take a typical midsize company with 55 lawyers who collectively review an average of 9,526 contracts each year, a 51.5% productivity increase allows the same legal team to process 4,906 additional contracts each year – the equivalent of adding 28 lawyers to the team.

The benefits of AI based contract management don’t end when the deal is signed. Your contracts contain mountains of valuable data that can help you better run your business and increase efficiency. The only problem is that you historically needed someone to review all those contracts to get at that valuable data, and few legal departments had the time or staff to do the job correctly.

Legal AI technology, though, can review thousands of contracts at once and export data in five seconds or less. When you apply that power to time-intensive, voluminous tasks like repapering, batch review, legacy contract migration and more, AI can save in-house counsel and legal ops professionals a significant number of hours. And that time savings can be reinvested into tasks that create value for the company. In fact, it’s been shown that properly managing contracts from start to finish can increase revenues by up to 9.2%.

A World of Possibilities for Legal AI Technology

Contracting is just one area where in-house lawyers and legal ops professionals are seeing real-world results by implementing AI. As innovation continues to disrupt the legal tech world, AI is being introduced into nearly every aspect of practice and business. But now, AI has evolved beyond a buzzword to provide meaningful – and impactful – results.

To read more about how legal AI technology impacts legal departments and other top trends shaping legal ops today, download our white paper Six Leading Corporate Legal Operations Trends for 2022.

How to Improve Legal Spend with Technology

Posted on March 10, 2022 by - Business Process Management, Digital Transformation, Enterprise Legal Management

If you work as part of a legal operations team, chances are you spend plenty of time thinking about how to improve legal spend – specifically, how to manage and reduce it. Under ever-increasing pressures to do more with less, the spotlight on legal spend is brighter than ever.

The following are just a few examples of enterprise legal management software can go a long way toward reducing legal spend.

1.   Improve Legal Spend by Moving to Electronic Invoices

You can’t improve legal spend without understanding what your baseline is. If your law department and its law firms are working with paper invoices, you limit the chances of understanding what your spend truly is and where you may be overcharged. Plus, paper invoices limit insight into vendor management, evaluations and comparisons.

Why? Because for most corporate legal departments, manual invoice review is time-consuming, tedious and can lead to human error. There are simply too many invoices and not enough time or resources to vet line items. Plus, it’s hard to compare and analyze costs when all information is on paper.

E-billing enables a corporate legal department to adopt industry standards for formats and billing codes. From there, legal ops can begin to capture and “digest” precious data for reporting and analysis – valuable indicators such as overall spending, trends and more – and compare them to industry benchmarks (more on that below). It also minimizes the time spent inputting invoices into billing systems for review and payment processing.

2.   Use a Specialized Legal E-Billing System Rather Than a General Tool

There are a lot of e-billing systems on the market, but many of the most popular ones aren’t designed to handle legal billing. Too many corporate legal departments fall back on general e-billing tools when a legal e-billing system can better deal with legal-specific billing problems and improve legal spend.

Among other things, the right legal e-billing system will offer the following functionalities, which are traditionally not available in general e-billing tools: supporting electronic timekeeper rates from outside counsel, preventing law firms from billing to matters without approval, receiving invoices in the industry-standard Legal Electronic Data Exchange Standard (LEDES) format or comparing LEDES invoices against company billing guidelines, permitting write-offs or rejections of individual invoice line items, allowing for comparison of invoices against budget, supporting the automatic allocation of invoices to specified cost centers or codes, and allowing for reporting on spend by relevant factors such as time, activity, matter, firm and more. All of these capabilities are critical to accurate and efficient legal invoicing.

3.   Automate Billing Guidelines that Comport with Outside Counsel Guidelines

Compliance with outside counsel billing guidelines is one of the most important goals of reviewing invoices. Manual review is not up to the task. Technology is, so make sure you have a tool that allows you to input your specific billing guidelines so they can automatically and consistently be applied across all your invoices to identify areas of improper charges and prevent overpaying.

The billing rules often come as part of legal spend management systems. They automatically scour incoming invoices from law firms and legal vendors for discrepancies and fix or flag the invoice for further review. This relieves reviewers from manually combing through each line item, often resulting in immediate savings.

4.   Implement AI that Looks Between the Billing Rules

Legal invoice review has long been rules-based. While billing rules represent an excellent first step for reducing legal spend, it’s only the beginning. Invoices may still slip through the cracks with a purely rules-based approach or be incorrectly approved for payment.

How does this happen?

Billing rules, while valuable, rely on specific descriptions or words to identify potentially improper charges. If by some chance, an invoice employs different keywords or descriptions not included in billing rules to describe a line item, billing rules may not flag the charge. It may, instead, not identify the noncompliant charge and approve it for payment. After all, you can’t program billing rules to consider every potential variable in word choices.

If you want to further improve legal spend, consider an AI-powered invoice review tool that looks between the rules to find hidden legal invoice review errors and even more savings. These technologiesdf work in conjunction with enterprise legal management systems. They are trained on millions of legal invoice charges to look for areas where overpayment is common, or correction is typically needed – things like block billing, vague descriptions, work done by the wrong class of staff or non-work travel.

When these issues are identified, InvoiceAI can either automatically adjust the charge to comply with outside counsel guidelines or it can bring the problem to reviewers’ attention, significantly reducing the likelihood of improper payment and lowering overall legal spend in the process.

5.   Leverage Benchmarking Technologies

Knowing how much you spend on a particular law firm is great. Even better, though, is knowing how much you should spend based on what everyone else is spending – even down to a law firm in a specific location for a particular task. This is where benchmarking comes in.

Benchmarking is a critical part of any sound legal spend management system. But the benchmarking technology you select needs to provide attributes such as practice area, timekeeper level, work type and discounts, which will provide you with the negotiation leverage you need during conversations with your law firms.

For example, a top private equity firm saved 17% on its rates, realizing more than $27M in savings in the first year by leveraging smart benchmarking data.

Also, to ensure that you always understand the going rate for upcoming matters, make sure your benchmarking solution also has proprietary competitive cohorts of law firms based on at least 100 factors, including general firm expertise, rates and even individual partner expertise.

Conclusion

The pressure to do more with less likely won’t end any time soon, but there are ways of meeting that demand by implementing the right technology. Contact us today to learn more about how InvoiceAI and Onit’s enterprise legal management system can help you reduce your legal spend. And if you’re interested in leveraging the power of legal services benchmarking and market intelligence, reach out to our subsidiary Bodhala.