Category: Enterprise Legal Management

Note: originally published in the German-language legal tech publication “Legal Tech Verzeichnis.” Translated here.

In a challenging economic environment, Legal — like all departments — faces increased scrutiny for operational and cost efficiencies. Metrics are vital to showing Legal’s value to the organization — and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are a potent tool to demonstrate the department’s importance.

As detailed in a recent PriceWaterhouseCoopers survey, organizations of all shapes and sizes worldwide face an increasingly worrisome economic environment. The combination of global conflict, aftereffects of the pandemic, new rules and regulations, and a persistent wariness about economic foundations make for a business world defined by uncertainty.

The result of this environment? A new focus on operational and cost efficiencies throughout every department of the organization. Legal is no different. An optimized, streamlined legal department can help fuel growth in trying corporate times. The current environment provides Legal with a sterling opportunity. Per the 2022 Enterprise Legal Reputation (ELR) report, Legal can “materially impact” the organization by bolstering revenue, improving sales negotiations, and increasing efficiencies — evolving beyond its traditional role as the “protector of the business” and into a material business partner.

The challenge for Legal? The value of a legal department is mainly known to the organization anecdotally; traditionally, it’s been tough for organizations to quantify the impact of Legal on the business. In a data-driven world, this puts the legal department at a disadvantage.

Metrics drive departments, and for Legal to be recognized as a direct, material contributor to the enterprise, it needs numbers to back that assertion. That’s where key performance indicators (KPIs) come in.

How KPIs Drive a Modern Legal Department

KPIs are measurable values that indicate how well an organization is achieving its strategic or operational goals. KPIs that demonstrate how Legal is optimizing its processes include:

• Total outside counsel spend
• Spend by law firm
• Legal spend as a percentage of revenue
• Budget-to-actual total spend comparison (e.g., percent handled within budget)
• Outside expense versus in-house
• In-house lawyers versus revenue
• Cost per matter
• Matter staffing
• Spend after implementing billing compared to spend without

When used effectively, KPIs demonstrate the legal department’s value and enable it to make data-driven decisions to improve efficiency. However, remember that you can’t manage what you don’t measure. To use KPIs, you need an effective means to collect and measure them, including technology. That’s what an enterprise egal management (ELM) solution can provide.

Using Enterprise Legal Management Solutions to Track KPIs

For KPIs to work for a legal department, you need an ELM solution to provide real-time access to critical metrics or data. Here’s how they can help:

• Cost savings. A legal spend management capability provides insights into where the department spends its budget, allowing you to find out where to achieve cost savings — for example, by reducing outside counsel spend, streamlining legal operations, or renegotiating rates.
• Matter management. Track key matter management metrics, including case volume, time spent on cases, and outcomes; with this, you can identify trends and areas for improvement (e.g., reducing cycle times, improving settlement rates, and increasing win rates).
• Vendor management. Help track vendor performance, and get insights into vendor cost, quality, and timeliness to discover your top-performing vendors, negotiate better rates, or terminate underperforming vendors.
• Compliance: Track legal compliance metrics — such as regulatory compliance, internal policy adherence, and risk mitigation — to ensure the department meets compliance requirements and identifies areas where additional training or policies may be needed.
• Team productivity: Explore team productivity metrics, such as workload, time spent on administrative tasks, and team utilization; discover areas to streamline processes or find where to utilize team members better.

Another benefit of adopting ELM software? Over time, the solution creates a database of historical matters and associated spend, arranged int Uniform Task Based Management System (UTMBS) and Legal Electronic Data Exchange Standard (LEDES) codes. From there, you get powerful analytics and insights into legal spend that can inform data-driven decision-making.

Armed with enterprise spend management software that tracks KPIs, your department gets the valuable information it needs to contribute to business goals and achieve year-over-year improvements — and become that driver of value and savings for the company rather than just a “cost centre.”

The Seven Golden Rules of KPI Implementation

Ready to get started with KPIs for your legal department? Before you begin the project, remember these seven golden rules of KPI implementation and use them as your guide:

1. Start now. Don’t wait. Begin your KPI project now with existing data instead of delaying the implementation.
2. Align with strategy. Make sure the KPIs are in sync with overarching corporate and department goals.
3. Customize. Use KPI lists as inspiration — but tailor them to your company’s needs.
4. Collaborate with stakeholders. Engage with all needed stakeholders in the KPI development process to secure alignment and buy-in.
5. Keep it simple. Don’t develop too many KPIs or bring in complex metrics that are difficult to measure or understand. Simplicity should rule.
6. Be realistic. Set realistic targets. Ensure KPIs are challenging yet attainable based on historical performance and industry benchmarks.
7. Look for continuous improvement. Regularly review and update KPIs to keep them relevant and effective in driving business outcomes.

By keeping these seven golden rules in mind as you develop your KPIs, your legal department can get the robust metrics it needs to quantify its value to the organization and take its place as a direct, material contributor to the enterprise.

As discussed in part 1, the 90s and 00s saw many barriers to widespread adoption of legal e-billing software. With many of these huge logistical stumbling blocks overcome by changes in legislation and developments in software, the last decade has seen more legal departments mandate their law firms to use e-billing so they can better manage spend, budget accurately, and make strategic matter resourcing decisions.

Another driver of this uptake has been the transformation of the legal market in general, such as increased pressure on legal departments to actively reduce spend, or at least demonstrate value from their expenditure. Previously, because of the nature of the legal department’s role, all costs were perceived as necessary to protect the business. This attitude has gradually changed and, like all departments in a business, legal is also expected to operate successfully and more efficiently – hence the rise in legal operations.

Legal spend management software, and the process of e-billing, is essential in managing and controlling legal spend. Although it carries a cost, it more than pays for itself in what it can save the department. However, the traditional, on-premises solutions were cost-prohibitive for all but the largest corporate teams and would not deliver ROI unless legal spend was huge. Although in-house teams understood the benefits, they couldn’t justify the investment.

This prevented the growth of legal e-billing. The rise of cloud-based SaaS solutions lowered software cost, opening legal spend management to more corporate teams and driving faster e-billing adoption throughout the market. The addition of new vendors in the market introduced a competitive element that facilitated faster improvements in the features available to corporate legal departments and their law firms. Additional functionality means that the potential benefits of using legal spend management software are much improved vs. 10 or even 5 years ago, and at a lower cost too!

The demand for legal e-billing software from in-house legal departments meant most law firms had no choice but to embrace truly automated e-billing systems (or face doing it manually…) which means at many firms, e-billing is now fully integrated into the normal billing routines, which means that there is less manual intervention and therefore the costs associated with e-billing are lower. Ideally in these firms there will be validation of time recorded, codes, narratives, rates, timekeepers, and expenses earlier in the billing process; e-bill production will be integrated into the firm’s time and billing system; and there will be checks for compliance with client billing rules before the bill is finalized. These law firms are now much more on the front foot, have well defined processes for on-boarding new e-billing clients, have support for e-billing in client/matter inception and time-recording systems; and their lawyers, secretaries and back-office staff are comfortable with e-billing requirements and processes. They are seeing strategic benefits to e-billing in the same way their corporate counterparts do.

However, it is not necessarily the large global law firms that have led the way in e-billing. In the UK, successful legal e-billing implementations have taken place in several smaller niche firms as well. As corporates move away from the traditional panels of global law firms and increasingly rely on smaller or niche firms, these firms have had to embrace e-billing to stay competitive. The key success factor that marks out these firms is their ability to integrate e-billing into their normal business routines. These firms have changed their internal processes to support the move, have trained all their staff in what is needed to make e-billing work, and made key changes to their systems to support the technical requirements.

They are now able to deliver electronic invoices to their clients in a cost-effective and efficient manner, with a low percentage of billing errors and are now sharing the benefits of e-billing software with their clients.

Latest Legal E-Billing Trends

Although e-billing is yet to be adopted by every legal department or firm, the fact that a large proportion have been using legal e-billing for over a decade is driving exciting developments in the industry as the legal market demands more innovation and further value from e-billing as a legal spend management enabler. Start-ups and developments at existing vendors mean some of these innovations are already possible, though none are embedded as business as usual throughout the industry. Over the coming years, we’ll see development and latest legal e-billing trends in the following areas:

• Collaboration. With the basic processes ironed out, the focus is moving onto optimizing these processes and making them more collaborative. Vendors are investing in improved interfaces between law firm and corporate systems to improve the experience for the law firm (whose e-billing interface is typically sub-standard compared to the in-house teams’), allow admin and set-up tasks to be distributed more flexibility or evenly between firms and in-house so the workload is shared, improve in-software communication and collaboration, automate more processes, and reduce manual effort.
• Work in Progress (WIP) Tracking. With conventional e-billing the client only sees the information at the bill stage, by which time it is too late to challenge any problematic entries and the invoice gets rejected. Despite the growth in fixed-fee arrangements, hourly billing is still common and in-house legal increasingly need to see matter costs and resource staffing in a timely manner for better visibility of matter budgets and status. Interestingly, many law firm systems already hold detailed real-time information on live matters and can retrieve this, “at the touch of a button.” For those that don’t, tools like BusyLamp enable clients to ask their law firms to submit WIP. Thus, the in-house team can see, review, and query this information in a timely manner and avoid surprises and difficult conversations when the invoice arrives, building a better and more trusting relationship. This transparency is also useful for both parties in validating the value of fixed-fee arrangements.
• Managed services. As in-house teams strive to achieve even more ROI from their legal spend management solutions and reduce the cost of low value work, we will see increased outsourcing of the invoice review process itself to vendors and legal service providers so in-house counsel and their external lawyers are spending more time on legal work.
• Artificial Intelligence (AI). Advancements in AI and machine learning will allow more of the e-billing and matter management process to be accurately automated. This and other improvements in automation will in turn make e-billing more integrated into a firm’s day-to-day case management, time recording and billing processes and make it the “normal” way to bill with lower costs. AI is not a magic button though; a substantial volume of good quality data is essential to begin using AI.
• Integration. One of the perennial issues with e-billing has been how to get different software systems to speak to each other and this is compounded by the fact that law firms are at different stages of development and/or using multiple systems. The big international firms are still out in front, having heavily invested in global billing and management information systems. There is now work underway to define a standard set of software tools to facilitate a direct interface between the law firm’s time & billing system and the client’s preferred e-billing vendor system. Put simply, this could potentially remove the requirement to output a free-standing file of invoice and other legal data and then manually upload these files to an e-billing vendor application.
• Platform solutions. Combined matter and spend management solutions are common and some also support integration with contract or document management applications. The trend is towards a single platform to manage the full lifecycle of legal work to prevent having to log-in to multiple systems to do a day’s work. Legal spend management solutions will continue to expand beyond just the process of e-billing to include sourcing/RFP, WIP, reporting, panel review, rate comparison and other “beyond e-billing” functionality that is found in tools such as Onit’s European legal spend management solution BusyLamp eBilling.Space.

Part three of a three-part “Guide to Seamless Legal Tech Implementation” Parts one and two are below.

Part 1 – Scoping the project before buying or building the technology
Part 2 – Ensuring the internal and external project stakeholders are on-board

Change management is essential for successful legal tech implementation. It is often understated or not fully appreciated, sometimes seen as an “add-on” to the project’s more technical aspects. Those who underestimate the importance of change management during implementation often fail to achieve the desired business outcomes.

Routine tasks will change, and with that comes an inevitable learning curve. For example, with e-billing, manual invoice checks and approvals are replaced by automated rules-based processing. Change also brings more exposure to and interaction with business processes and data. Humans are wired to resist change, with numerous studies showing a strong preference for items and processes that have been around longer, even when maintaining the status quo is irrational. Changing takes conscious effort to learn something new, so communication is vital when presenting changes and benefits. Often the “why” and the “how” are not communicated company wide. Why has the organization decided to do this, and how will it benefit the organization and those that work there?

Unless everyone has a clear vision and understanding of the potential benefits, it can be difficult to institute change management. Change management includes guiding, educating, encouraging, and supporting the organization through this transition period. Complexity and scope define change management strategy for a software project. Let’s break this down into six key sections.

Sponsorship

Active sponsorship for change at a senior executive level is vital to success. This sponsorship must be active and visible to the project team and all stakeholders. In many cases, the sponsor will set the project’s strategic direction and drive the program forward. They will judge any conflicts that may arise and act as an “honest broker” in issue resolution to move the legal tech implementation forward. The sponsor will also be the primary source of high-level project communications and be the figurehead of any key announcements to the broader user population.

Stakeholder Buy-In

As we identified in the previous blog, it is essential to identify the key project stakeholders and stakeholder groups affected directly or indirectly. Some of these groups or individuals may be fully on board with the program and may require little management in expectations. If using a phased approach, start with this group and use them as a case study to communicate their achievements because of the change. It’s also better that any issues happen with a keen sub-group than the whole company.

Some likely key stakeholders may have other priorities or may be resistant to the change that a major project will bring about. Managing this resistance is very important if the project is to succeed, and you can use many tools and techniques to overcome it. This can range from the obvious, such as education and communication strategies, to the more extreme measures, including negotiation and bargaining. A last resort – coercion – will likely be counter-productive in the long term.

Involvement

Legal tech implementation and changing key processes will inevitably result in role and responsibility changes for some of the organization’s employees. The likely impact will depend on the business process level and operational change undertaken. As part of the planning phase, it is vital to engage and involve team members whose day-to-day tasks will change and capture the key business processes, both current and new, including reasons for change. These are likely the same users who provided requirements for the scoping document. This will help to ensure only necessary changes are made, not change for change’s sake. Also, capture their perceived negatives and positives, as you are unlikely to have considered everything; this helps with the implementation of legal tech and communication later. This analysis exercise will provide valuable information to the project team and the basis for discussions on potentially sensitive job reassignments undertaken as part of the implementation. With e-billing, most changes involve freeing legal teams of administrative burden to focus on high-value work, so the organization should positively receive these changes.

Impact

It may seem obvious, but it’s not always the case that identifying and measuring the benefits to be achieved is an essential stage in any legal project implementation. The structures and processes need successful implementation to help realize those benefits. The organization may not identify these benefits before implementing change but capturing them is essential. Benefits realization will extend beyond the implementation timescale, as benefits are often not realized until well after the go-live date.

Communication

On most projects, the first communication task undertaken by the legal change management team is the project launch announcement. Even though this may seem to have come from the project sponsor, the actual drafting will likely be by the project team itself. At the project launch, the team should inform the broader company about the project, its objectives, the expected benefits, key milestones, and members of the project team. There are many ways to transmit communications through an organization, which will often depend on the culture within the company. For example, it could be that the company’s intranet is a repository for updates and general project news, as well as other means – newsletters, departmental meetings, workshops, e-mail, etc.

It is essential to have a communication plan within the wider project plan, identifying formal information-related events as the project unfolds. As well as progress updates, inform employees of new process designs and changes. The more widely you communicate potential changes, the more likely people will understand, rationalize the benefits, and be open and accepting. It will also help with identifying possible project early adopters, who will prove invaluable when it comes to reinforcing the changes among their peers.

Readiness

Training is often left to the end of the project plan but is critical in preparing the company for a change. The project team should identify essential elements such as the approach to training, the delivery styles to be deployed, the level and nature of end-user help documentation, and how the team will measure the training program’s success. Training courses and documentation development must fully incorporate the business process information alongside the change messages and reasons for change. Courses and documents must match the depth of knowledge different groups of individuals need, from overviews to power-user level.

The organization will need help desk services, hand-holding and intensive one-to-one assistance, particularly in the immediate post-go-live period. Some software vendors provide this, but you may need to arrange it yourself, and your law firms will need support too. This investment will not only support the go-live process but will also serve as a knowledge base for new joiner training programs and possible future phases of implementation.

Related to training is the usability of the software you purchase or build. Do users need to learn a new interface? Is there another login to remember? How easy to understand is it? Many projects fail because users cannot get to grips with the system and find it easier to stick with the old process.

Change, in its broadest sense, is constant in organizations today and can be driven by many different forces, including customers, markets, and technology. Yet research shows that many change initiatives fail to accomplish their intended outcomes and may even limit the potential of an organization and its people.

The consequences of not managing change effectively can be devastating and long-lasting, so all company-wide stakeholders must understand the potential issues and equip themselves with techniques to support change-management initiatives.

Onit’s European legal spend management solution BusyLamp eBilling.Space helps customers plan their change management and user acceptance initiatives, as we understand how vital it is to your project’s success.

Learn more about BusyLamp by requesting a demo today.

Legal operations encompasses all the legal department’s responsibilities that are not the law itself. This includes spend management, efficiency and productivity, communication, vendor management, technology, change management, and data analysis. The most specific definition on offer is from the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC), which umbrellas legal operations over 12 competencies that every legal function should aspire to have at three maturity levels; you can find this resource on their website.

Functions and Benefits of Legal Operations

Typical roles and responsibilities of legal operations include:

• Defining and driving initiatives to improve efficiency and process workflows
• Managing outside counsel guidelines, legal spend (visibility, control, and reduction) and department budget
• Optimizing law firm performance for maximum value for money
• Implementing, measuring, and analyzing metrics that inform decision-making, turning them into actions that deliver improvements
• Implementing technology to achieve these goals
• Working cross-functionally to demonstrate the legal department’s value within the organization to the business
• Effectively executing these functions to produce benefits that improve the productivity and profitability of the legal department, allowing the team to demonstrate their value to the business
• Helping to shape focus areas for the department and defining areas for short- and long-term improvement.
• Introducing metrics and KPIs for measuring and benchmarking these focus areas.
• Deploying dedicated legal operations resources undistracted by the practice of law to focus on raising the profile of Legal and its value to the business.
• Building stronger, data-driven, transparent relationships with external providers to maximize value
• Building more strategic partnerships with outside counsel and service providers.
• Standardization and automation of repetitive or administrative tasks such as invoice review so that the team can spend more time on high-value work.
• Encouraging consistent use of technology and processes across the team and integrating with systems in the broader business for company-wide strategic analytics.
• Influencing data-driven staffing, matter resourcing and other decisions.

The Rise of Legal Operations

The function has been around longer than you might realize. CLOC, for example, was formed in the USA back in 2010. In our survey of legal departments, the Legal Operations Benchmarking Report, only 2% of departments were not focusing on legal operations at some level.

So, what’s driving the recent prevalence of the legal operations function? In the 1980s and earlier, corporate legal departments were almost entirely focused on risk and compliance and advising the business. The legal function was the cost of doing business. Over time, business has become more complex, regulated, and global. With that, demand for legal services (and therefore costs) has increased, with increased pressure to control these costs and complexities. Organizations now expect the legal department to manage budgets and efficiencies like other departments.

General Counsel are under more pressure than ever to justify their legal costs and improve the efficiency of their department. With this demand to make the legal department act more “like a business” comes a need for cost control and process improvement. The challenge for a traditional legal team is that the skills needed to do this effectively are separate from a standard lawyer’s repertoire. This has led to the need and rapid spread of legal operations-specific technology, processes, and people.

How to Staff the Legal Operations Function

Options are available for legal departments that need to cover legal operations responsibilities. They can upskill existing legal team members, bring in commercial managers from elsewhere to manage the legal operations, use consultants, or hire an experienced legal operations manager from outside.

What to Look For in a Legal Operations Manager

An effective legal operations manager combines knowledge of the practice of law, an understanding of the business and its challenges, and commercial skills. Besides the technical skills of change management, commercials, data analysis and technology, a successful legal operations manager can navigate the business and manage multiple stakeholders. As a support function, if the manager is unaware of the challenges, they will not be able to solve them. They should also demonstrate a proven track record of transformation, efficiency, and cost control initiatives.

For example, a lawyer moving into this role may need upskilling in data and technology. A business manager moving into this role will need upskilling in managing law firms and the legal industry. All the necessary skills are essential throughout the team, even if they are not the legal operations manager. Don’t split the team into lawyers and non-lawyers but have the whole team working together operationally towards common goals. Identify where your skills gaps are and look to address these when hiring the legal operations manager.

How Legal Operations Functions Without a Legal Operations Manager

Even in teams with no legal operations manager, the responsibilities of legal operations are still getting done – even if they don’t have the “legal operations” name. Around 44% of the Legal Operations Benchmarking Report respondents have legal operations tasks assigned to one or more individuals not solely dedicated to the legal operations function. In this case, ensure there is someone in the business who oversees the responsibility, usually the General Counsel. If the skills exist throughout the team and there is an individual responsible for the strategy, your legal department can achieve operational goals without a dedicated manager.

You may, however, need to introduce non-lawyers into the team if the change, technology, data, and commercial skills are otherwise lacking. We do advocate hiring a dedicated resource to manage legal operations. Without a dedicated resource, operations will take a back seat to the practice of advising the business, especially during busy or under-resourced periods. A dedicated manager ensures operational goals get the focus and attention they need.

Using Legal Operations Software to Improve Performance

In today’s business world, the combination of skilled personnel and software fuels goals such as transparency, efficiency gains and data analysis. Legal Operations is no exception, proven by glancing at the world’s leading legal operations teams. No one among them does not rely on legal operations tools in their daily work.

Some of the applications and benefits of technology include:

• Creating workflows for repetitive tasks automates manual processes and improves productivity
• Real-time dashboards on matter or contract statuses give visibility to stakeholders
• Legal e-billing ensures law firms adhere to billing guidelines which saves money and time
• Organizations can compare law firm prices and performance for more transparent and fair reviews and negotiations
• Knowledge management tools make it easier to collaborate, search and find information and documents
• Consistent data creates reports and analytical capabilities to enable decision making

Our Legal Operations Benchmarking Report found a high correlation between legal operations maturity and the breadth of legal technology used. Whether the results compare country, industry, or company size, the result is the same; there is a correlation between mature legal operations and technology usage. Using technology to assist in achieving goals means greater success, which leads to growing legal operations departments and more advanced capabilities and goals. But a warning: legal as a department is typically behind the curve when it comes to digitalization, and although the benefits of legal technology are apparent, adoption and change management issues can slow down your route to success. Look for experience in this area when building your team.

Using Legal Operations Systems for e-Billing, Spend, and Matter Management

E-billing, legal spend, and matter management are solutions often implemented for legal operations because it’s easy to achieve a fast ROI. As many of the benefits are directly related to cost savings, the solution soon pays for itself. For example, automatic enforcement of billing guidelines spots errors a human invoice reviewer can miss, generating considerable savings in the first year of software usage. Real-time cost transparency, such as Onit’s European legal spend management solution BusyLamp eBilling.Space‘s Work in Progress tracker, removes surprises when the invoice arrives and allows for more accurate budgeting.

In addition, matter and spend management solutions deliver many efficiency and collaboration benefits, such as:

• Invoice processing is automated, faster than a human reviewer, reduces manual errors, and frees up lawyers to do more valuable and engaging work.
• Reports and dashboards are generated automatically or built quickly, using a centralized database of matter and spend information. No more hours and days wasted compiling information from multiple sources of on and offline data. They also improve the visibility of actual and upcoming spend and flag high-risk matters.
• Centralized matter and documents improve collaboration internally and with law firms and enable fact-based negotiations and reviews.
• The data generated by using technology can be analyzed and used to make strategic decisions to further improve legal operations and Legal’s value to the business.

Request a demo of BusyLamp eBilling.space.

Strategic decision-making is crucial to the long-term success of any organization. But do you have the right solution that enables you to make more informed decisions? With BusyLamp, your Legal team can track and analyze legal spend, identify areas for cost savings and make informed decisions about the allocation of legal resources. By providing real-time cost transparency and customizable dashboards, Onit’s European legal spend management solution BusyLamp eBilling.Space helps to make data-driven decisions that drive business success.

Want to hear about BusyLamp in action? Here are five real-world, game-changing use cases that show the difference BusyLamp can make.

Reporting Business-As-Usual Legal Spend to the Business

This in-house team was under pressure from the business to accurately forecast external legal spend. However, this is only possible after removing anomalies, as matters such as litigation and M&A are unpredictable. The business will always pay for this type of work, regardless of budget and where spend is regarding budget. The legal department, therefore, agreed with the business that they would deliver forecasting on business-as-usual spend only.

The team deployed BusyLamp to calculate their business-as-usual spend on a monthly and annual basis. This is easy with BusyLamp reporting, as they can exclude litigation and M&A data categories when creating a report. This report gets sent to stakeholders regularly and enables daily tracking of business-as-usual spend. This data is further analyzed to understand what this spend looks like by jurisdiction, matter type, internal client, and more so that they can provide more detailed forecasting.

Our client has dramatically improved their forecasting accuracy, and the business is happy with the level of detail they now provide.

Making a Business Case for More Headcount

A very under-resourced internal legal team often outsourced matters because they could not meet internal deadlines. They used BusyLamp reporting to understand their spend by matter type over a year, assessing what they spend on each practice area and the PQE of the external lawyer doing the work.

They could spot that a lot of general commercial work was being outsourced purely because of the capacity of their team. They quickly understood how much they were spending on these matters in total, so they evaluated what the cost would be if they could work on these matters internally instead.

Legal Operations created a business case to grow the team by two additional personnel. After approval, they successfully added two general commercial lawyers to the team, reducing the volume of work outsourced to their law firms. This resulted in a substantial reduction in their total legal spend.

Deciding Which Firms to Outsource Work

After using BusyLamp for some time, this in-house team decided they wanted to collate qualitative data and the quantitative data already held in the system. They chose to use BusyLamp surveys to measure the quality of the work completed by firms. The team looked at the seniority of the external lawyer, the score given by the in-house lawyer assessing the work, and the types of matters.

They identified that one of their law firms had scored an average of 9/10 for IP work, with a partner doing the work at a premium rate. Another one of their law firms had scored an average of 8/10 for IP work, with an associate doing the work.

They considered that 8/10 was still of sufficiently good quality but at a much lower rate than the partner at the other firm. The team allocated more IP work to the Associate, with the most critical IP work still going to the other firm’s partner. This resulted in a significant saving in costs for IP matters without compromising on quality or value for money.

Reaching Volume Discount Milestones

In this case, a customer had negotiated volume discounts with the law firms; however, they had no way of tracking when firms reached the spend milestones. After implementing BusyLamp, the company scheduled several reports for periodic automatic delivery, including monitoring spend by firm.

Today, legal operations know the exact spend for each law firm. When the firm approaches a rebate or discount milestone, the in-house team allocates as much work as is reasonable and appropriate to these firms to hit the milestone and activate the discount. This significantly reduces annual external spend.

Getting Visibility of Spend by Activity Type

By using “spend by activity type” reporting in BusyLamp, this in-house legal team realized they were spending a lot of money on “internal communications” with their law firms. This spend included many matter types that did not usually require this amount of internal communication allocation.

The team contacted their law firms and requested that the correct lawyer be allocated to their matters in the first instance to reduce internal communications. They also informed the law firms that the organization would no longer pay for internal communications. Their law firms agreed to the terms.

Internal communications were then added to their billing guidelines so that any line items relating to this activity type would get flagged for review. The change helped our client to reduce their spend and the amount of time their law firm partners spend completing their matters.

How BusyLamp Helps

With BusyLamp, Legal departments can:

• See their legal matters and spend from the entire business in one place.
• Understand where legal budget is being spent; what types of matters, in what jurisdictions, with which firms
• Stop wasting time compiling spreadsheets – reports can be built in an easy-to-use report wizard.
• Save even more time by automating delivery of reports that are needed frequently.
• Create reports on any field within the system to understand your matters and make data-driven strategic decisions, whether that be to reduce legal spend, manage legal risk, or evaluate law firm performance.

Request a demo of BusyLamp eBilling.space.