Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions’ legal process and technology experts have published two valuable tools designed to help corporate legal teams ensure seamless end-to-end matter management from intake, throughout the matter life cycle, and into post-matter reporting. Our checklist and eBook on the subject outline ways for legal departments to collaborate effectively and efficiently, even with reduced or remote staffing.
Using either the brief checklist or the more in-depth eBook, legal operations leaders can learn more about the “straight-through” approach to matter management, which emphasizes a seamless and holistic strategy that can improve spend control, productivity, and risk mitigation. Although the level of detail in each of these guides differs, both advise legal departments to take eight specific steps to optimize their operations, even in lean times. These steps are:
Standardize and automate outside counsel management
Bringing your matter management together in one platform can streamline your workflows, simplify collaboration and communication with outside counsel, give you better visibility into your legal spend, and prompt important tasks with preprogrammed reminders and notifications.
Collaborate securely to mitigate risk
Avoid data breaches – and the reputational damage they can cause – by ensuring that your valuable legal data in documents, diaries, notes, and calendars is protected with modern technological security measures.
Simplify global e-billing
For legal departments operating in multiple countries, the e-billing process can be complex and confusing. To address this challenge, implement multicurrency support, credit note handling, and VAT compliance features to take that administrative burden off of staff members.
Ensure quick user onboarding
Busy legal professionals do not want to spend time learning how to use new tools to get their important work done. Ideally, they should be able to work directly in the applications they already use daily and have intuitive drag-and-drop options for email, documents, and other attachments.
Make reporting routine
An integrated reporting tool makes it possible to easily analyze the aggregated, homogenized data your team generates in day-to-day operations. The result is complete transparency into every matter.
Use business intelligence (BI) for data-driven decisions
It’s important to use an enterprise legal management (ELM) tool that captures meaningful information that can be analyzed with BI tools. This data can help answer key questions about your department’s performance and legal spend, supporting data-driven decisions that can improve almost every aspect of legal spend and operations management.
Capture service of process (SOP) data in matter management
Integrate SOP records directly into your matter management solution to reduce staff time and cost. Implement automation to additionally reduce security risks and error-prone manual entry.
Drive down total cost of ownership
Straight-through matter management can drive reduced spend by enforcing outside counsel billing guidelines, providing insight into law firm performance, and freeing up staff to focus on high-value tasks. The typical mid-sized corporate legal department implementing an integrated e-billing and matter management system can expect first-year savings of up to $800,000.
For more on how your legal department can benefit from this holistic approach, download the checklist, Streamline matter management in eight steps, or the eBook, Eight steps to straight-through matter management.
