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FAQ: What Is Enterprise Legal Management?

September 17, 2025 (3 min read)
FAQ in center of comment boxes for the CounselLink+ FAQ: What Is Enterprise Legal Management?

Summary

Periodically, on the LexisNexis® CounselLink+™ blog, we’ll pose frequently asked questions (FAQs) we receive from legal operations, in-house lawyers, general counsel, and law firms.

CounselLink+ is an enterprise legal management solution for corporate law departments. Legal operations teams benefit from an enterprise legal management solution with its robust applications because it offers collaborative features for the in-house legal team and any vendors. Internal stakeholders can also benefit from the dashboards and work intake functionality of the solution.

Below are five questions our professional services and client services teams often hear:

What is Enterprise Legal Management?

CounselLink+ Enterprise Legal Management is a cloud-based software developed by LexisNexis. It is a comprehensive platform that enables corporate legal departments to manage legal spend, vendors, matters, contracts, and workflows from a single integrated system.

What are the origins of Enterprise Legal Management?

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, enterprise legal management software played a significant role in the technology-driven transformation of the legal department. There was the integration of legal operations, matter management, budgeting, compliance tracking, contract lifecycle management, and analytical reporting and measurement incorporated into enterprise legal management software.

Why is Enterprise Legal Management important to the legal department?

This trend in the early 2000s was spawned from a need for legal departments to be centralized and driven by data. Legal operations, a burgeoning area in the law department, was required to utilize real-time insights into spending, workflow efficiencies and risk management. Having an end-to-end solution, like CounselLink+ enterprise legal management software, provided new legal operations teams with the capability of improving how they managed the law department’s increasingly complex functions. Because the software enables collaboration among in-house legal teams and outside counsel in one unified platform, productivity is enhanced and workflows improve.

What applications are included in Enterprise Legal Management solutions?

Particularly in CounselLink+, the following applications, and more, are featured in the platform:

Matter Management

Legal departments that utilize enterprise legal management software benefit from various applications at their fingertips. CounselLink+ features matter management integrated with contract lifecycle management. This is a critical feature of CounselLink+ in that contracts link and integrate with respective matters in a single, unified dashboard. There is no more hunting for documents when matters are being managed.

Legal Spend Management

Beyond matter management, operations teams benefit from legal spend management with an enterprise legal management platform. This includes setting billing guidelines, AI-powered invoice review with the CounselLink+ SmartReview® application, vendor invoice upload with e-billing applications, LEDES format of e-billing, and also paper invoice submissions. Budgets can be managed and legal spend monitored through comprehensive dashboards.

Contract Lifecycle Management

Contract Lifecycle Management is a critical application of the enterprise legal management environment. Those responsible for contract management can draft a contract directly in the platform using the Microsoft Word add-in. Everyone on the team can view and track versions and monitor each phase of contract execution.

Vendor Management

Vendor management can be managed in the ELM dashboard with custom scorecards that help determine the performance of outside counsel teams, respective to matters. The LexisNexis Lex Machina® Counsel Selector provides a side-by-side comparison of counselors in various practice areas, specialties, jurisdictions, and track records.

Work Management

Work management is another feature of enterprise legal management software. As law departments grow and manage more complex and robust legal matters, working with various stakeholders, workflows need to be generated that make legal issues more streamlined. With automated tools like Work Intake, legal departments can influence the efficiency of workflow management to enhance productivity and improve how work gets completed.

Are there AI tools in CounselLink+?

CounselLink+ is continuously innovating with AI tools for legal departments, including:

  • SmartReview®, powered by AI, enables automatic review of vendors’ invoices, flagging and correcting timekeepers’ errors based on billing guidelines.
  • Extractive AI in Contract Lifecycle Management quickly identifies key facts and clauses in signed contracts, streamlining review and saving valuable time. 
  • LexisNexis Protégé™ in CounselLink+ is a personalized assistant designed to intelligently understand legal matters, invoices and strategic priorities. Protégé delivers timely, contextual insights that enhance productivity with matter summarization, decision-making and the support of strategic legal work.

Get In Touch With CounselLink

Legal departments interested in seeing a demo of CounselLink+, can reach out to the CounselLink team here. Account representatives will guide you through the various features and functionality of this credible enterprise legal management solution.