Strategies and insights from our white paper partnership with CLOC
Note: This blog post originally appeared on the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) blog. View the original post here.
Legal technology is an increasingly important factor for corporate legal departments’ spending priorities. According to a recent report, 78% of legal departments say that “legal technology is a ‘must-have.’”
We recently partnered with CLOC on a white paper, “Turning Legal Into a Value Center,” that shares best practices around cost-saving strategies from legal operations leaders. It was no surprise that one of the most important ways legal departments are reducing cost and optimizing their spend is through efficiencies created by technology.
Below you’ll find an overview of five of the most common types of legal technology the legal ops teams we spoke to are using, and how they impact cost savings. To learn more, download the full white paper.
Optimizing Spend With Legal Technology
Rather than providing a comprehensive overview of types of legal technology (which could fill an entire white paper on its own, if not a book), in this section we’re highlighting five technologies that the legal operations professionals we spoke to found useful, particularly for optimizing legal spend and achieving cost savings.
#1 Understanding Internal Requests – Intake Platforms
Several of the legal operations professionals we talked to recommended intake platforms as a good starting point for legal operations initiatives. They can be thought of as a “legal front door” and help your team gather information about internal requests for legal services. You can determine which business partners are requesting work, who is requesting the most work, what that work looks like, who is doing the work and much more. This can be extremely helpful for making resourcing decisions. While off-the-shelf products exist for this function, it can also be built using project management tools that many companies already use for other business functions, or even common tools like spreadsheets.
#2 External Spend Overview – E-billing Systems
When it comes to legal spend, e-billing may be the most common type of legal technology. In addition to managing ongoing billing, it’s also a key source of historical data about the money you’re spending on outside counsel and other external resources: What types of matters your company is spending the most on, the vendors those matters are going to, trends in practice areas, timekeeper rates, hours spent on projects and much more. Looking at this data gives you a picture of your external legal spend and can help you identify places where you may be able to shift resources to save costs.
#3 Tracking Tasks Efficiently – Matter Management
Matter management tools are extremely powerful, but they also are most useful for larger companies that manage many different projects going to outside counsel or other alternative providers. Often, they are integrated with the e-billing systems discussed above. For legal departments whose outside spend is limited, it might make more sense to track matters using tools the company already has access to, like project management software or spreadsheets. However, for large legal departments, off-the-shelf matter management software can greatly enhance efficiency, storing key information about matters and giving the necessary attorneys, paralegals and other staff the ability to easily collaborate and keep track of statuses.
#4 Doing Business Faster – Contract Lifecycle Management
Contract lifecycle management (CLM) tools are very popular and for great reason. One of the most visible ways legal impacts other business units (and has a direct line to revenue) is by way of contracts. CLM systems track the life of a contract as it’s touched by people throughout the organization and, ideally, drastically reduce the amount of time it takes for legal to review and approve contracts. In some cases, through automation or features of particular CLMs, legal can be removed from the loop entirely, especially for low-complexity contracts. Contract management is also a space where artificial intelligence and generative AI are creating efficiencies—one company we spoke to said that leveraging AI for standard contracts like vendor agreements and Non-disclosure Agreements (NDAs) cut their review times down from as high as an hour to 5 to 10 minutes.
#5 Self-Service Solutions – Knowledge Management
For just about all of the legal operations professionals we talked to, knowledge management was a priority (one referred to it as the legal department “white whale” because of its huge potential and the difficulty of doing it well). Why it’s a priority is clear: When your business partners can self-serve information they would otherwise go to the legal department for, it’s a huge win. Not only does your department save that time but it also enables your business partner to get their work done faster, increasing efficiency at both ends. Organizations often use internal hub sites (e.g., wikis or FAQs) to track reference materials but more and more companies are experimenting with chatbots to surface the right information to the right people at the right time.
For Sake of Comparison – RFPs & Decision-Making
For many of the organizations we talked to, one of the most important aspects of evaluating legal technology is sending out requests for proposals (RFPs) to potential vendors. Usually, this comes at a stage where you’re close to making a decision and have narrowed your sights to a few options, although the process can still be helpful even if you’re just evaluating one solution and the question is whether to buy it or not. It’s likely larger companies will have an RFP process for technology procurement that you can leverage and tweak to meet your legal department’s needs. That process involves sharing your company’s current position, what you would like to achieve with the technology, the specific deliverables and timeline for the project, the budget (if possible) and other details that are relevant to the project. From there, you collect and compare the information you received and use that to inform your decision-making process.
For more cost-savings best practices, strategies and insights, download the white paper, “Turning Legal Into a Value Center.”
