The haves and have-nots will always feel the difference when the topic is e-billing solutions in corporate legal operations. This digital transformation in managing outside counsel billing and invoicing...
ELM solutions in the corporate legal department are gaining critical entry into global corporations. As a necessary foundation for efficient legal operations workflow, ELM solutions provide an integrated...
Efficiency and organization in the legal department and law firms drive the pathway to success. Attorney case management software provides one of the indispensable tools for modern law practices, transforming...
At its core, matter management serves as the backbone of corporate legal operations, orchestrating every aspect of legal work within an organization. Think of it as the central nervous system coordinating...
The digitization of everything in corporate legal departments, and now with the advent of AI, means that the law department and outside counsel need to utilize legal e-billing software to streamline their...
In-house legal and law operations teams continuously face challenges due to various factors. Each team manages daily issues and must also be prepared for the singular issue that draws all hands on deck.
Lawyers want to practice law without concern for law operations. Some areas in the legal department overlap legal and operations, primarily associated with vendor management. Often, legal matters can be too complex to manage in-house, and law operations must join forces with the legal team to hire outside counsel to collaborate on matter management.
The legal department is a cost center, and that requires budget management. Utilizing vendors suggests in-depth budgets to pay for costly matters, sometimes taking months to complete. Law operations teams need to be on top of the budget and expenses for outside counsel. They need financial management tools to review law firm billing so errors can be found and corrected automatically. Robust enterprise legal management solutions provide that feature.
In the major industry reports about the in-house legal landscape and rising outside counsel fees, one of the common factors challenging law operations is lack of technology automation. Strategic planning is a must to determine the type of technology that adds value, contributes to performance and productivity, enables collaboration, and adds efficiencies to the legal and law operations teams.
As mentioned above, enterprise legal management software provides a solid foundation for automation in the law department. Law operations can realize more efficiency with a solution that addresses vendor and matter management; financial management with AI tools; work intake, also with AI abilities; high-quality analytics and reporting with dashboards, metrics and scorecards to measure performance; contract lifecycle management; and various other features.
In any cost center, as law departments are, the ability to manage a budget without going overboard is a moving target at times. The unexpected, complex legal matter that rears its ugly head from a business unit has the ability to swing budgets to the red.
The other aspect of balancing a budget is outside counsel fees that continue to rise with no glass ceiling to halt the upward spiral. Some industry reports cover these fees in practice areas, and the numbers show that Large Law share of wallet continues to grow.
Some law operations teams search for smaller law firms with equal expertise as the AmLaw 100. This enables lower hourly rates for partner costs on legal matters. Some law operations professionals may use vendor management tools to measure outside counsel performance pertaining to budget management. These tools are provided in the enterprise legal management platform introduced above.
In any law operations department, and any company, the threat of cyber attack is real. Daily, news of massive data breaches occurs, and it’s too late for the information within the data to be protected.
This is a highly critical and complex challenge for legal departments. Hackers are fully aware of the rich data within a legal department. Law operations must identify an enterprise legal management solution with complementary security within the technology solution provider.
Technology vendors need to offer secure cloud environments with protected data for customers. With software as a service, tech providers can hire the talent to monitor the platform in real time. This service assures that the data in a legal department is secure and remains confidential.
Law operations teams are a critical component of the legal department. Their challenges can be smoother by selecting the right technology and the best technology provider team with which to partner. Reach us to discuss how we can help.