Enterprise Legal Management Features Improve Law Department Value

Legal departments are critical to companies. In particular, those legal departments that function with enterprise legal management features are more valuable to the company. In this article, we’ll explore what enterprise legal management is, enterprise legal management features that legal departments need, and the benefits provided.

What is Enterprise Legal Management?

Legal departments consist of legal operations professionals who ensure that the functionality of the law department runs smoothly. Legal ops pros are often responsible for hiring talent, evaluating vendors, hiring vendors, analytical reporting with data to deliver elsewhere in the organization, billing and invoicing, technology assessment, and procurement, to name a few.

On the other side of the department is the legal team. Obviously, they are responsible for managing work intake requests, matter management, contract management, and collaboration with outside counsel.

How do the two collaborate and streamline workflow? Enterprise legal management software provides that balance between the two sides of the coin. The platform allows 360-degree visibility into work management, vendor management, financial management, contract lifestyle management, and analytical reporting with data gleaned from the software.

Everyone collaborates by utilizing enterprise legal management features that create a smooth-running legal department.

Enterprise Legal Management Features That Benefit the Law Department

Several primary features of ELM software benefit the legal department. We’ll explore five of them:

Work Management

Lawyers in the legal department answer to the organization and must also build relationships with outside counsel. Part of an efficient operation requires a work management tool to enable the management of inquiries coming from all sides of the company.

For example, if a human resources manager has a legal question about employee discrimination, the question can be submitted via a digital form created by the ELM platform. This enables efficient work intake, and if the question is simple, the legal team can quickly address it.

Some advanced ELM platforms utilize the tools of Microsoft Teams with an AI assistant, called “Ask Legal.” This creates wonderful benefits for the legal team, as simple questions posed by other departments can get immediate answers from the Ask Legal assistant. The answers are input prior to the launch of the tool and have legal approval prior to their availability on the chatbot.

The benefits of a work management tool like this are easily recognized. The more time the legal team has to work on more important matters, the more value is created. Saving the legal team’s time has much to do with budgeting and overhead expenses. A legal operations professional must be in sync with time versus cost so they can manage a balanced budget.

Vendor Management

Primarily, the typical vendor hired by the legal department is outside counsel. Law departments exist to protect the enterprise from external and internal situations. Externally, there may be hostile takeovers; lawsuits; patent infringements; intellectual property protections; regulatory, compliance and governance issues; and so much more. Internally, the legal department may be needed for discrimination cases; disagreements; contract infringement; employment disputes; and much more.

To manage every legal issue that crosses their desks, the legal team needs the ability to manage their vendors. Vendor management tools within the larger enterprise legal management platform are critical. Vendor management enables the selection and evaluation of new and existing vendors, or making decisions to change the legal teams hired, tools are required to provide a bird’s eye view of the vendor ecosystem.

ELM software provides the opportunity for visibility into all vendors, including the number of partners and timekeepers billing time against a matter; vendor fees and whether rates increase from year to year; scorecards about performance; whether the vendor team is diverse; and also, the rate of matter wins for the organization.

Without vendor management tools, the legal department cannot get a precise snapshot for the internal team. Manual rating of vendors is nearly impossible.

Financial Management

As a cost center, the legal department should operate under a balanced budget. This can be challenging due to unforeseen circumstances with legal matters. Regardless, financial management of the legal department is best done with an enterprise legal management solution.

For legal departments that hire more than a handful of vendors, managing the budgets, billing, invoicing, and more for each can be daunting, especially if the financial management is done manually in a spreadsheet.

Advanced enterprise legal management features help the legal operations team digitize the billing experience with vendors. These tools can automatically track, flag and autocorrect billing errors submitted by outside counsel. The financial management tools review the billing descriptions submitted by the law firm and look for erroneous descriptions that are miscoded and in the incorrect format.

The ability to automatically adjust vendor billing, often in the favor of the enterprise, contributes to cost-saving strategies and frees time among legal operations and the legal team. Manual invoice review is minimized.

Contract Management

Contract lifecycle management digitizes the entire contract experience beginning with negotiation, contract development, redlining, execution, and ending with post-contract management.

Managing these stages and others in the contract lifecycle need to be done with enterprise legal management software so that the contract experience collaborates with the ELM experience. Essentially, contract lifecycle management needs to be integrated with ELM to deliver the most opportunistic benefits for the legal department.

Often, contract management software is separated from ELM solutions. For the legal department, it is intrinsically important to have them under one roof, so to speak. This provides wonderful efficiencies, collaboration, the ability to link contracts with matters, and higher visibility into the department’s performance.

Another great advantage of contract lifecycle management tools is access to templates and storage. Anyone drafting a contract should consider not doing it from scratch. There are a variety of templates for all practice areas that enable more efficient contract drafting. In addition, clause libraries with the software provide examples to those in need to language to add to the contract.

Matter Management

Most of all, Enterprise Legal Management software is about matter management for the legal team. Legal matters are at the core of enterprise legal management solutions. With the onboarding of a matter, legal teams launch daily management of everything listed above: work, contracts, finances, and vendor management. In addition, analytical reporting comes out of the Enterprise Legal Management solution, driven by data culled from each segment of the platform.

The benefits of enterprise legal management solutions provide legal departments with various ways to cut costs, streamline work, improve collaboration, increase productivity, and enhance efficiency.

Legal operations professionals interested in seeing a demonstration of an ELM platform featuring these enterprise legal management features and benefits can contact LexisNexis CounselLink.