April 29, 2025

Legal Tracker Software Maximizes Efficiency

Effective resource management with legal tracker software is vital for the success of a law department. It provides a streamlined approach to maximizing efficiency, enhancing productivity and empowering collaboration among the in-house legal team and their outside counsel. Managing legal operations requires optimization. With legal tracker software, legal departments can optimize spending and ensure compliance with...

April 24, 2025

Defining The Best Corporate Legal Department

How does a company define the best corporate legal department? Good, better and best are subjective unless there are defined metrics across various criteria to define best. The criteria to determine high-performing legal departments typically include qualitative and quantitative factors. For the former, qualitative factors, a key criterion is maturity in decision-making with data-driven insights. Insights that drive actionable...

April 22, 2025

LexisNexis CounselLink Releases 2025 Trends Report

LexisNexis® CounselLink® just released its 2025 Trends Report, now in its 12th year. It shows that average law firm partner rates continued to rise in 2024 at a rate of 5.1%. This increase is the second highest since CounselLink launched its annual Trends Report in 2013. It is slightly below the rate increase documented the year before, 5.4% in 2023, which was the highest on record, indicating a huge spike due...

April 17, 2025

Legal EBilling Software For Corporate Law Departments

Legal ebilling software is a necessary application for law departments, especially in this era of technology advancements that streamline, clarify and simplify workflow and bill review software . Other benefits of e-billing systems include increased accuracy in the invoice against agreed-upon budget, billing guidelines and compliance from outside counsel, and time savings. Lawyers can focus more on the practice of law...

April 15, 2025

When Should In-House Counsel Hire Outside Counsel

Outside lawyers are also known as outside counsel, working in law firms and hired by in-house counsel who work in corporate legal departments. The in-house legal team is directed by the general counsel, who indirectly manages external counsels. These external counsel work on strategy in partnership with the in-house counsel team and conduct the day-to-day work associated with case management and matter management . ...

April 10, 2025

Can A Human Resources Lawyer Use Extractive AI

A human resources lawyer typically specializes in employment law and provides legal guidance related to workplace issues. Their role can vary depending on the company's structure and needs, but generally, they are responsible for: Advising on Employment Law Compliance. Companies must comply with labor laws and regulations, including those related to hiring, firing, discrimination, harassment, and workplace safety...

April 08, 2025

Bring More Clarity To Hiring Outside Counsel

Hiring outside counsel requires understanding of various factors, expertise and credibility of the lawyer against the litigation needs of the in-house counsel team. Often, hiring outside counsel and retaining them aligns with relationships. How long has a law firm been engaged with a legal department? Did a law firm partner get business because a new in-house lawyer worked with them in the past? Hiring outside counsel...

April 03, 2025

Legal Counseling Trends In The Law Department

Legal counseling evolves rapidly due to economic shifts, mergers and acquisitions, talent recruitment, and technological advancements. Other factors contribute to how legal counseling matures, including changes in client expectations and the evolution of AI. These trends indicate a shift towards more accessible, efficient, and client-focused legal services, driven by technological innovation and changing expectations...

April 01, 2025

Essential Contract Management Tools For Law Departments

Contract management tools are essential for corporate legal departments to streamline the contract lifecycle management (CLM) process. Before addressing the types of contract management tools that work best for lawyers, let’s look at the evolution of contract lifecycle management. One of the key emerging trends in contract lifecycle management is blockchain . More organizations are using blockchain to manage,...

March 27, 2025

Buying Tips For Legal Contract Lifecycle Management Software

Legal operations professionals keep tabs on software needs in the law department, often running audits to determine which software is obsolete and which needs to be purchased. In this article, we look at buying tips for legal contract lifecycle management software, define legal contract lifecycle management (CLM), and pose several tips on purchasing legal contract lifecycle management software for the legal and legal...

March 25, 2025

What Is Work Intake In Legal Departments

In the corporate legal department, work intake , similar to legal intake, is how work enters the legal team’s queue. Lawyers in a law department work on active matters and are not looking for legal issues to join their purview until a stakeholder raises a red flag. That red flag can be a simple legal question, or it may be an issue that requires legal team attention. Regardless, the process remains the same: stakeholders...

March 20, 2025

How LexisNexis CounselLink+ Reimagines The Redline

This article first appeared on Above the Law on February 5, 2025. Contracts are now integrated into an end-to-end system, and efficiencies abound. With its recent launch of CounselLink+™, LexisNexis has provided a highly comprehensive tool to streamline your law department’s entire workflow. The “+” in “CounselLink+” refers to integration — users of the system now have access...

March 18, 2025

Outside Counsel Guidelines Bolster Vendor Relationships

To establish a robust partnership between your internal legal team and external legal counsel, a back-of-the-napkin understanding won't suffice. Clear outside counsel guidelines are essential to improve vendor performance and prevent misalignment on assigned work or critical matters. Essentially, outside counsel guidelines help allocate resources and billable work while reducing inefficiencies and expenses. This...

March 13, 2025

Best Contract Management System Includes Extractive AI

A contract management system is a digital solution designed to streamline and automate the management of contracts. A contract lifecycle can take months to negotiate if the legal team executes a contract manually. A legal team can shorten the contract lifecycle with robust software incorporating extractive AI. An enterprise legal management platform provides the best contract management system because they are integrated...

March 11, 2025

What Is Legal Case Management?

Legal case management is a comprehensive approach to handling legal cases efficiently and effectively. It involves the use of a legal case management system, the specialized case management software for lawyers. Various methodologies exist within the legal case management system to organize, track, and manage legal cases from inception to resolution. This system is designed to streamline the workflow of attorney case...

March 06, 2025

What Is Agentic AI?

One of the most frequent questions, “What is agentic AI,” provides an opportunity to explore advancement in artificial intelligence. How better to do that than with the assistance of a generative AI Large Language Model (LLM) that did a fantastic job providing the framework for this blog post? The information below looks at the evolution of generative, extractive and agentic AI; its impact on various industries;...

March 04, 2025

Legal Department Operations Challenges

Internal and external factors affect legal department operations challenges every day. The evolving legal landscape prompts navigation around these complexities to maintain efficiency and effectiveness. Key Legal Department Operations Challenges Budget Constraints Budget constraints and the pressure of lower budgets can limit the ability to invest in new technologies, hire additional staff, or engage outside counsel...

February 27, 2025

Legal Software as a Service For Law Department Efficiency

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is a cloud-based service where instead of downloading software on your desktop PC or business network to run and update, you instead access an application via an internet browser. Legal Software as a Service applications could be anything from law department software, like an enterprise legal management platform, to unified communications among a wide range of business apps that are available...

February 25, 2025

Managing External Counsel With Standardized Benchmarks

Managing external counsel in the legal department comes with various challenges. The primary challenge is rising hourly rates in all practice areas and geographies. Other challenges managing external counsel may arise in performance evaluations and the quality and length of legal services to close a matter. One way managing external counsel benefits the legal department is to set a standardized benchmarking program to...

February 20, 2025

Master Legal Budgeting Challenges With ELM Software

Legal budgeting is a critical component of the law department, yet it presents numerous challenges for legal operations and their stakeholders. Legal budgeting requires a strategic approach, from aligning with corporate financial goals to managing external counsel costs. Below, we explore the common challenges faced in legal budgeting, the preferences of stakeholders, and the role of legal budgeting software in streamlining...

February 18, 2025

LexisNexis CounselLink+: A One-Stop Shop To Streamline Law Departments

This post originally appeared on Above the Law on January 23, 2025. Recent CounselLink upgrades integrate the full in-house workflow with the broader suite of LexisNexis products. Corporate law departments have elevated the legal operations profession in recent years, making these roles central to their ongoing quest for ever-more efficiency. With its recent launch of CounselLink+™ , LexisNexis has provided...

February 13, 2025

What Is Blockchain and Contract Lifecycle Management?

Influencers and thought leaders in the legal technology space Legal Tech's Predictions for Emerging Technology in 2025 predict blockchain will affect smart contracts and contract lifecycle management in the corporate law department. This prediction brings exciting opportunities for general counsel and legal operations professionals who manage department efficiencies, productivity and performance. First, we need to...

February 10, 2025

CounselLink+ Leverages Power Of AI in Contract Lifecycle Management For In-House Counsel

By LexisNexis® CounselLink® One of the biggest headaches that in-house counsel grapple with is how to effectively manage their organization’s vast universe of contracts — from complex commercial transactions to routine vendor agreements. Contract lifecycle management (CLM) tools have eased this pain a bit in recent years, but artificial intelligence has the potential to provide insight into contract...

February 06, 2025

Measurable Legal Team Metrics Drive Decision-making

Mature legal departments use data to drive strategic decision-making, but how should legal team metrics be set up and measured? Enterprise legal management software is a technology that runs a corporate legal department. It helps deliver the data from legal team metrics culled from key performance indicators, measurable goals, and analysis of various factors including legal spend, billing and invoicing, contract life...

February 04, 2025

Vendor Management Best Practices For Legal Operations

Vendor management best practices vary from legal department to legal department. Regardless, the common threads among them all are to improve management of vendor relationships, manage legal spend and determine which vendors earn contracts. These, and other considerations in vendor management systems best practices, are crucial for legal departments and legal operations teams seeking to optimize the law department....