Contract lifecycle management tools enable legal teams to automate the contract management process within the corporate legal department. This critical benefit helps streamline the entire contract management...
In legal ops, managers look for simple legal billing software to pave the way to efficiency and cost-saving strategies in the legal department. E-billing software has been around for decades in many permutations...
LegalTech Breakthrough, a leading independent market intelligence organization that evaluates and recognizes standout legal technology companies, products and services around the globe, recently announced...
In the world of the corporate legal department, an ELM platform provides the foundation for technology that unifies the workspace. For those who don’t know the meaning of an ELM platform, it is an...
Law operations, legal operations, law department, legal department, in-house counsel, outside counsel, and many other things go hand-in-hand in the practice of law and the delivery of legal services between...
In the world of the corporate legal department, an ELM platform provides the foundation for technology that unifies the workspace. For those who don’t know the meaning of an ELM platform, it is an enterprise legal management solution that the legal team and legal operations professionals can use for collaboration, streamlined workflow, matter management, financials, contract lifecycle management, vendor management, and much more.
At the crux of the ELM platform is matter management. When lawyers receive an issue from the work intake queue, which comes from a variety of locations throughout the company, and it turns into a matter, the legal team can open the matter directly in the ELM solution. This, in turn, prompts all the enterprise legal management features to turn on. Via the ELM platform, both in-house legal and outside counsel can access active matters and can collaborate on case management. Moreover, legal department leadership can see the status of matters at a glance.
We mentioned in the previous section that a legal team performs more efficiently with work intake. Those legal departments that utilize an ELM platform can benefit from tapping into a legal intake stream. Legal intake provides many benefits, and a primary benefit is to enhance productivity and efficiency among lawyers on the legal team.
Because business stakeholders are concerned about legal issues throughout business units, they approach the legal team with questions. Sometimes, the questions are basic, such as, how can I access an NDA; what is the policy for FMLA, or does the company have a non-compete agreement? Selecting the right ELM platform provides the legal team and business stakeholders access to a legal assistant called “Ask Legal.”
Ask Legal is an AI-driven assistant that allows individuals to self-serve many of the policies, procedures, agreements, or other widely used documents accessible to staff, team members and employees. Ask Legal is of tremendous value to legal teams as it separates the basic legal questions from the more critical issues that may require legal attention.
Any corporate legal department must hire legal services. This may include alternative legal services providers or hiring outside counsel in law firms. It may even be a combination of both. Regardless, a legal operations professional is highly engaged in the hiring of outside counsel and needs a methodology to analyze and audit whether a law firm is the right fit for the enterprise.
Utilizing a vendor management dashboard in the ELM platform, legal operations can determine the mix of timekeepers, whether partners are billing on a matter, the diversity of a legal team, and the metrics with which to assess and evaluate.
Every enterprise legal management solution must provide e-billing and invoice review. These smart financial management features enable outside counsel to submit invoicing that aligns with matters via the ELM platform. Legal operations can implement billing guidelines and rule sets so law firm partners and timekeepers bill according to approved parameters. With the best enterprise legal management solution, the legal department can use a smart AI-driven financial tool to flag and auto-correct invoicing errors. This is a valuable feature of the financial tools built into the enterprise legal management system.
In addition, when a legal department aligns with an advanced technology provider, there are additional financial services provided by a team of legal experts who review law firm invoices with the subjective eye of a human (versus machine). Should the need arise for negotiation, the legal team hired to conduct managed bill review is trained in that type of arbitration.
One of the most important capabilities of advanced enterprise legal management involves the linking of contracts to matters directly in the enterprise legal management solution. Some may ask why this is important. Imagine a corporate legal department with hundreds of matters and many vendors that assist with legal services, for example. Each vendor requires a contract, and if there is breach of contract and a matter ensues, linking the matter with the actual contract in one platform is ideal.
Other enterprise legal management solutions may not include contract lifecycle management software. When legal operations professionals select an advanced ELM platform, they need to look for that alignment between matters and contracts.
The technology solution selected for the legal department provides a critical foundation. As there are many ELM platforms from which to select, legal operations should consider the functionality of the ELM platform along with the credibility of the solution provider. Contact us to schedule a call to discuss how enterprise legal management software benefits your legal department.