Strategic Services Contribute To Data-Driven Decisions

Summary

Every legal department is charged with enhancing value. It’s an esoteric thing, but highly doable with the right strategic services partnership. In this article, we explore the types of strategic services offered by LexisNexis® CounselLink®, an enterprise legal management platform.

An expert team can analyze data in the legal department and recommend various offerings to enhance strategic decision-making and positively impact value.

Why does impacting value matter to the legal department? The complexity of the legal landscape, the challenges of managing budgets, and the do-more-with-less mentality continue to create obstacles in the law department. A major goal is adopting a technology partner that can provide a robust foundation for enterprise legal management and deliver innovative solutions that the C-suite appreciates.

How To Advance Legal Department Value?

What does it take to advance legal department value? Selection of an enterprise legal management solution requires more than choosing software. A big consideration is whether the technology vendor offers ancillary services to advance legal department value.

LexisNexis CounselLink offers a team of professional services experts delivering strategic services to advance legal department value. Utilizing the data captured in the CounselLink+ ELM environment, the strategic services advisors can recommend many of the following programs that align with value, goals, maturity, and enhanced decision-making.

Conduct a Health Check

A health check evaluates the use of CounselLink features and operational processes to provide an assessment of legal department maturity. CounselLink Strategic Services recommends a Health Check every two to three years. A health check fuels the data required to build a roadmap for ongoing success and increased ROI.

The benefit of incorporating health checks into a routine helps legal operations prioritize value-based insights directed at change management. Technology solution providers, like LexisNexis CounselLink, want customers to be proficient in software utilization and document internal processes. Conducting a health check enabled reconfiguring, consolidating and streamlining the enterprise legal management environment and activating previously unknown features.

Implement Outside Counsel Invoice Guidelines

Do invoice reviewers consistently enforce outside counsel guidelines when reviewing and adjusting invoices? An optimization project starts with granular analysis to evaluate the application of each rule and whether individual bill reviewers are consistent in their processes. Consultants then recommend guideline changes, training opportunities and specific rules to add, remove or reconfigure to increase savings and improve invoice review efficiency

In the 12 months following guideline enforcement and optimization, CounselLink customers increased legal spend savings on average by 2.3X over the prior 12 months, according to CounselLink customer response data. Customers realized improved user experience during invoice review and greater consistency in reviewer behavior (once inconsistencies were pointed out during the project and training).

Develop An Hourly Rate Savings Analysis

Are the hourly rates paid to outside counsel consistent and fair relative to benchmarks? Are you leveraging the volume of legal spend with preferred vendors to negotiate the best rates? To answer these questions, CounselLink Strategic Service conducts a three-year historical hourly rate analysis. It includes specific firm-level recommendations for reducing outside counsel spend through rate negotiations.

In one example, CounselLink analyzed a customer’s opportunity to negotiate lower prices with several law firms, resulting in a 2.4% reduction of annual spend totaling nearly $1.5 million for those firms. Legal department leadership receives documentation from the CounselLink analysis of negotiation recommendations, and these changes can be implemented immediately with outside counsel. The annual CounselLink Trends Report provides deep insights about law firm partner billing rates. 

Set Up A Management Dashboard

Management reports are abundant, but don’t communicate a story. Leaders today want to see results of key performance indicators in one place, presented in a compelling format that drives action. Customized dashboards quickly provide the right information to manage multiple legal department initiatives better. Consultation with CounselLink Strategic Services to create the right dashboard for your legal department includes recommendations for optimal metrics, visualizations and overall design. Legal departments can unlock the power of custom dashboards to bring data to life visually. Often, one custom dashboard leads to another. This enables many types of data to help with the management of initiatives. Data is packaged and presented in colorful charts to help business stakeholders:

• Clearly see trends in spending
• View and correct workload imbalances
• Assess vendor performance and take corrective action
• Hold practice group leaders accountable for budgets
• Determine if matters are staffed diversely

Always Use Metrics

Metrics, metrics, metrics! Most general counsels want them, but it’s hard to home in on the most critical data points. CounselLink Strategic Services recommends the right set of metrics to measure departmental results and progress toward advancing legal department value with goals. This project often combines with a management dashboard project to provide greater visibility of metrics.

Customers appreciate a customized approach to meeting with individual practice group leaders. The outcome is understanding how to improve results and specific recommendations of metrics and group targets. Metrics for legal departments are not one-size-fits-all. For one customer, CounselLink established four-to-six metrics across eight practice areas. Choosing the right metrics requires understanding corporate goals and historic struggles while identifying a path forward through actionable data.

Customize Vendor Management Scorecards

How can the legal department boost vendor performance and relationships without baseline insights? Legal departments rarely have robust vendor management programs to assess performance. Consultants meet with stakeholders to understand vendor expectations, establish processes to gather diversity data (if desired), recommend metrics to include in a vendor scorecard, develop a scorecard, and recommend processes for ongoing performance reviews.

Vendor management can be done with custom scorecards within the CounselLink+ ELM environment. This eliminates anecdotal law firm assessment and permits use of a vendor dashboard with fingertip access to vendor insights. Metrics are established by in-house legal team interviews, guided by CounselLink Strategic Services, to determine best practices for scoring metrics. Lawyers click into a single location for a law firm’s score, relative to other firms, to determine service excellence and areas for improvement.

LexisNexis CounselLink+ ELM Solution

CounselLink+ delivers various features to law departments interested in advancing legal department value. Complete with AI-driven tools to accommodate matter management, contract lifestyle management, vendor, work and financial management, the solution is a robust enterprise legal software that is scalable to results-oriented.
With one click into the LexisNexis ecosystem, users never have to leave the CounselLink+ dashboard. Legal operations professionals can manage the law department from a legal operations hub. Everyone collaborates and communicates in a single unified dashboard. 

To see the full CounselLink+ enterprise legal management platform, schedule a demo. 

TL;DR

LexisNexis CounselLink is an enterprise legal management solution for law departments. The technology provider includes professional services and strategic services teams. The strategic services experts seek ways to advance strategic value in the law department with programs that audit and analyze data.
The programs are executed to enhance strategic decision-making and add value to he law department.