Manage Outside Counsel with Advanced Enterprise Legal Software

In the dynamic landscape of legal operations, making informed decisions to manage outside counsel vendors and other external legal service providers is crucial for ensuring the success of your organization. Vendor management tools exist to offer legal operations professionals the essential resources they need. These tools help in the effective navigation of the complex task of managing vendors and evaluating their performance.

In this blog post, we will look at some areas legal operations professionals may face to manage outside counsel and how a technology solution helps address them.

Build Strong Foundations: Manage Outside Counsel with Profiles and Evaluation Metrics

One of the first recommendations for legal operations professionals to manage outside counsel is to build comprehensive vendor profiles that provide a holistic view of each external legal services provider. This includes high-level and detailed metrics such as vendor costs, matter type distribution, efficiency, diversity, timekeeper performance, and more. Having access to this wealth of information enables legal operations professionals to make well-informed decisions when evaluating services and assigning the right work to the right vendors.

Manage Outside Counsel Partners: Determine the Best Law Firm for Each Matter

Identifying the most suitable law firm for a specific matter is an age-old challenge in the legal department. It can be addressed with vendor management tools, for example, an advanced technology solution should provide scorecards that rate law firm performance, a rate benchmarking tool for fair rate negotiation, and a diversity report aligned with the American Bar Association Diversity Survey. These features ensure that legal operations professionals can select the best vendor that can meet organizational goals and diversity targets.

Strategic Decision-Making: Vendor Performance Analysis

When selecting a technology partner that is well-versed in vendor management, ensure that the partner also delivers strategic consulting services. These services can provide analysis, audit and development of best practices in vendor management to aid legal operations professionals in making informed decisions. Seasoned professionals with expertise in analytics, dashboarding, scorecard development, and much more, provide expertise around methods to gauge vendor performance and determine which outside counsel team is a good choice to meet the goals of the corporate legal department. Legal operations professionals can utilize the information to discern high-performing outside counsel and rate them against established metrics. The corporate legal department is supplied with critical information about top, average and low-performing vendors and facilitates efficient resource allocation with the fostering of collaborative relationships.

Enhanced Collaboration: Interacting Effectively with Vendors

Effective collaboration with vendors is essential for successful legal operations. This collaborative engagement can be simplified by offering tools to stay on top of matter status and costs, share notes, calendars, and contacts, establish budgets, and communicate billing guidelines. In addition, it is advised to seek a technology application that allows for the negotiation of fee offers and helps determine innovative early payment terms. Enhanced collaboration contributes to a more streamlined and transparent vendor management process and also serves to strengthen relationships for the long term.

Advanced Invoice Review: Ensure Vendors’ Billing Compliance

One key responsibility of legal operations professionals is the management of legal billing. This requires an in-depth review and analysis of all vendor invoices to ensure they align with billing guidelines. An advanced enterprise technology solution should provide automated legal bill review that identifies areas of concern in vendors’ invoices. Line-item analysis of invoices spots errors for correction. If left unchecked, legal billing errors contribute to an unbalanced budget, putting cost-containment at risk.

In conclusion, vendor management requires a multifaceted approach. By utilizing an advanced solution like enterprise legal management, legal operations professionals can gain 360-degree visibility into vendor performance, make informed decisions using analytical features, and enhance collaboration at the same time. In a dynamic legal landscape, these tools are invaluable for those responsible for managing external vendors and ensuring organizational success.

For any legal operations professionals interested in best practice to manage outside counsel, check in with us.