June 2020 | Debora Motyka Jones, Senior Advisor, Market Engagement and Operations, Lighthouse

One of the most common complaints I hear from General Counsels and Chief Legal Officers is that they are not able to sit at a table full of their executive peers and provide metrics on how legal is impacting the core business. Sure, they are able to show their own department’s spending, tasks, and resource allocation. But wouldn’t it be nice to tell the business when revenue will hit? Or insights about what organizational behaviors are leading to inefficiency and, if changed, will impact spending. More specifically, as the legal operations team member responsible for metrics, wouldn’t it be great to share these key insights with your GC as well as your finance, sales, IT, and other department counterparts? Good news! Legal has this type of information, it is just a matter of identifying and mining it!

Keeping metrics has become table stakes in today’s legal department and it often falls on the shoulders of legal operations to track and share those metrics. In fact, CLOC highlights business intelligence as a core competency for the legal operations function. Identifying metrics, cleansing those metrics, and putting them forth can be quite a lift, but once you have the right metrics in place, you are able to make data-driven decisions about how to staff your team, what external resources you need, and drive efficiencies. If you are still at the early stages of figuring out which metrics you should track for your department, there are many good resources out there including a checklist of potential metrics by Thompson Reuters, and a blog by CLOC on where to start. HBR also conducts a survey so you can see what other departments are seeing – this can be helpful for setting targets and/or seeing how you compare. When you analyze these and other resources, you will notice that many of the metrics are legal department centric. Though they are helpful for the department, they are not very meaningful when they are sitting around the table with executives doing strategic business planning for the business as a whole. So what types of metrics can legal provide in those settings and how do you capture them? There are many ways to go about this, but I have highlighted a few that can provide a robust discussion at the executive table.

Leading Indicators of Revenue

Most companies are reviewing the top line with some frequency and in many industries it is a challenge to predict the timing of that revenue. Given its position at the end of the sales cycle, in the contracting phase, legal has excellent access to information about revenue and the timing thereof. Here are the most common statistics your legal department can provide in that area:

1. New Customer Acquisition: Number of Customer Contracts Signed this Month – Signing up paying customers is a direct tie to revenue and the legal department holds the keys to one of the last steps pre-revenue: contract signing. By identifying the type of contract that leads to revenue, the legal department is able to share with the business how many new customers are coming online. The metric is typically a raw number and can be compared against the number of contracts in a prior period. If not all customers who sign this contract lead to revenue, you will want to report (or at least know) the ratio of contracts to paying customers in order to give an accurate picture.
   
   Once you have been tracking this metric, you may want to take it a step further and identify and contracts that come earlier in the process. For example, in some companies, prospective clients sign NDAs earlier in the sales cycle. By reporting on the number of NDAs signed, you will start to see a ratio of the number of NDA to the number of MSAs and can give even earlier visibility into the customer acquisition pipeline.
   
   
2. Expected New Customers: Contracts in Negotiation and Contract Negotiation Length – If your company has negotiated contracts then reporting on the number of contracts in negotiation can also help with revenue planning. Knowing the typical length of that negotiation will give an indication as to the timing of that revenue.
   
   
3. Expected Revenue: Timing – The final piece of the revenue puzzle is when the above revenue will hit. You can work with the finance team to get the typical time between contract signing and revenue. This will often vary by contract size so layering in the contract size is helpful. If contract size if not available in the contract itself, that is likely information that sales keep so they can report that metrics if legal cannot.

The two departments most interested in all three the above metrics are likely to be sales and finance but depending on the detail reported at the executive level, these may be executive-level metrics. If the above seems like a lot, know that many contract management tools and/or contract artificial intelligence tools can mine your contracts for the above information.

Efficiency in Business Operations

Legal operations also has a unique ability to look back and reflect on the efficiency in some areas of business operations. More specifically, in the course of litigation and investigations, cross sections of the business are examined with hindsight and as we all know, hindsight is 20/20. Providing that look back information to the business can help in overall business efficiency. In addition, legal has access to payment clauses, in contracts, that can ensure efficiency in cash management. Here are some helpful statistics your legal department can provide on the state of legal operations.

1. Early Payment Discount Usage: Number of Contracts with Early Payment and Percentage of Early Payment Discounts Used – When signing vendor contracts, there are often provisions allowing for discounts if certain terms – e.g. payment within a short timeframe, are met. Although this may be fresh on everyone’s mind at the time of negotiation, this often gets lost over time. Using current technologies, the legal operations team can identify these contracts and provide the number of contracts in which such provisions exist. You can then work with finance to determine how many of these provisions are being leveraged – e.g. is the business actually paying early and taking the percentage reduction. The savings for the business can be material by just providing visibility into this area.
   
   
2. Data Storage: How Much Data to Keep – A common IT pain point is storage management and having to add servers in order to keep up with the business needs. With cloud technologies, IT often knows how much space they have allocated to each user’s mail or individual drives but what is unknown is how much data users are keeping on their machines or in collaborations tools and shared drives. With data collections for litigation or regulatory matters, the legal team has access to this information. This information can help IT understand its storage needs and put in place technologies to minimize storage per person thereby saving on storage costs.
   
   
3. Business Intelligence from Active Matters – This one isn’t a specific metric. Instead, this is more focused on the business intelligence that comes out of the legal department’s unique position as a reviewer of sets of documents. In litigation or investigations, the legal department has access to a cross section of data that the business doesn’t pull together in the regular course of business. Technology is now advanced enough to be able to provide business insights from this data that can be shared with the business as a whole.
   
   
   • Example #1: Artificial intelligence can be used to create compliance models that show correlations between expense reports, trade journals, and sales behavior to identify bad behaviors. Sharing these types of learnings from matters can open up discussions among executives as to which learnings deserve a deeper dive. As an aside, you could also imagine a scenario where this same logic can also be used inversely – when combined with revenue it could identify effective sales behaviors – although this is something that would be a bigger lift and I would expect the sales department to drive this type of work.
     
     
   • Example #2: The amount of duplicative data is a common metric reported in litigations or investigations. Sharing this with your IT team can highlight an easy storage win and legal can help craft a plan of how to attack duplicative data thereby leading to lower storage costs.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that there are opportunities for the legal department in these metrics as well. By using these metrics, as well as the artificial intelligence mentioned above, legal operations can resource plan and drive savings within the legal department. For example, the number of NDAs and sales contracts can inform staffing. Technology can identify contracts or other documents that are repetitive and automate the handling of those documents. Within litigation and investigations, technology can identify objectively non-responsive data so that it does not need to be collected as well as identify sources that are lower risk which don’t require outside counsel review and previously collected data that can be re-used.

I hope that with the above metrics, you’re able to participate in some great business discussions and show how your legal department is not only effective in its own right but how integral a unit it is to driving the core business.

To discuss this topic more, please feel free to reach out to me at DJones@lighthouseglobal.com.

June 2020 |
Jamie Berry, Executive Vice President – Litigation Business Unit Leader, Integreon
Maureen Atta, Senior Director, Integreon

Corporate legal operations (“ops”) in today’s pandemic-stricken world is challenging and unpredictable, mirroring the overall impact COVID-19 has had on our daily lives. In a matter of weeks, as governments worldwide issued “social isolation” mandates, most organizations were forced to completely transform to a Work from Home (WFH) environment, equipping most, or perhaps all, employees and contractors to work remotely, in order to continue operations.

In this new “normal,” corporate legal ops professionals and the constituencies they serve must steadily navigate forward to keep business moving and ensure that off-site workers are productive and compliant. Since many of the WFH arrangements–technology, security, and workflows–were established under duress as the pandemic swept the globe, it is time to reflect on some of the best practices being established day by day as legal ops professionals learn and innovate.

Find, Monitor and Fix

Just as there are issues to be addressed in our traditional brick and mortar workplaces, there are disconnects and problems with a virtual, WFH workplace that require the attention of legal ops professionals. To bridge the divide, proactive, frequent, open communication among team members and leveraging monitoring tools and KPI metrics to identify potential issues is critical.

Establish a culture of improvement that encourages team members to proactively bring issues forward so they can be resolved, and provide incentives for reporting problems and suggesting resolutions. Utilize mechanisms to draw out useful insights from personnel such as short, focused employee surveys.

Business intelligence and productivity monitoring tools can be used to glean substantial data from behind-the-scenes. Establishing baseline metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) that can be monitored and used to evaluate employee performance is a helpful step in gauging success. Analyze where employees are doing well, and where they are having trouble. Notice which level of help they need, with a goal of increasing their independence and identifying areas requiring additional training. Self-reliant workers have great value in a WFH era, and metrics can tell you how well employees are accomplishing work independently – or not.

Technology Touch-Base

Since technology makes WFH possible, frequent communication with corporate IT helps legal ops determine whether internet bandwidth/telecom issues, security threats, inadequate software training, or lack of daily in-person supervision are hindering legal workflow. Legal ops experts provide human resources to bridge the gap between the GC’s office and IT so technology is optimally serving legal professionals.

Legal ops professionals play a pivotal role in protecting confidential data as it flows between corporate legal, IT solutions, law firms and ALSPs (alternative legal service providers). Even before COVID-19 hit, cyber incidents were on the rise. Now, the previous volume of phishing, virus, ransomware and malware cases has been further compounded by WFH related factors. Malicious hackers are capitalizing on COVID-related chaos, confusion and potentially at-risk home technology environments. Therefore, now is an ideal time to remind employees and vendors of cyber threats and corporate data security policies which safeguard information and uphold compliance regulations.

Drafting of new or revised procedure language may be warranted as WFH business practices evolve. Policy documents from 2-3 months ago may be already obsolete since new cyber threats and jurisdictional specifics have possibly changed. Policies must be rigid enough to protect the organization while also flexible enough to pivot as external changes arise.

External service providers such as independent contractors, ALSPs and law firms must be able to demonstrate their ongoing commitment to upholding the company’s data security and confidentiality. Adherence to security policy is important now that documents and emails are primarily being received and sent from home computers and wireless devices. Data security must be a priority for everyone. Legal ops can take the lead to ensure its integrity stays intact throughout the pandemic and beyond.

Hiring During COVID-19

Many organizations have reduced headcount during this crisis. However, other legal departments and legal organizations have had to hire new or repurpose existing talent to manage existing litigation, revise contracts, review documents, and more. Even if they are not hiring right now, companies must prepare to ingest a wave of new litigation that will likely be coming as a result of this crisis. Some work can be done internally, but much will also be outsourced to law firms or ALSPs.

When onboarding new team members, coordinate with HR and IT to ensure that their hardware, software and security are optimized from the beginning. Consider providing a fully equipped “start-up kit” if this is feasible. Assess new hires’ technology acumen and make sure they have skills and training to become self-sufficient as soon as possible. Since employees are working on their own without supervision, they must be self-starters so they can work independently.

Legal Ops Builds the Bridges

No one knows how much longer the COVID-19 crisis will continue, or whether it will recur at future dates. One thing that is certain is that legal services delivery, and business in general, will likely never be the same again. As corporations and legal service providers have been forced to adopt WFH measures, they have learned to innovate, leverage technology, and build greater efficiency. The sharp focus of legal ops professionals on these exact topics means that their expertise will continue to be indispensable to their employers. Legal ops professionals are the architects who build and maintain the bridges that can prevent organizations from falling into deep chasms during a crisis like COVID.

About the Authors

Jamie Berry is Executive Vice President – Litigation Business Unit Leader at Integreon and Adjunct Professor at The Catholic University of America (CUA) Law School. Maureen Atta is a Senior Director at Integreon. Integreon, a trusted, global provider of award-winning legal and business solutions to leading law firms, corporations and professional services firms with over 3000 employees globally.

May 2020 |
Lorna Synan, Strategic Sourcing Manager – Legal Ideation and Transformation, Liberty Mutual Insurance
Robert Taylor, VP and Senior Corporate Counsel – Legal Ideation and Transformation, Liberty Mutual Insurance

Change is hard. Encouraging innovation and implementing change in an established and successful organization is even harder. Changing the legal service delivery model and implementing meaningful legal innovation, seemingly impossible. But it can be done. By leveraging techniques based in neuroscience, you can help people overcome emotional resistance that can be brought about by budget constraints, business imperatives, and pressures of the external marketplace. All these daily pressures and human nature itself can compete with their innate understanding and recognition of the need to innovate. Neuroscience studies the way the human brain works and how we respond to certain stimuli. It helps us understand what influences the way people make basic decisions. Learning more about motivators and stressors can help you shape how your employees or stakeholders respond to change. Which is why more and more organizations are hiring industrial psychologists and/or neuroscientists to help them better understand employees’ mindsets to unlock greater performance.

At Liberty Mutual Insurance, we began our innovation journey by asking a few questions: How do you innovate within a Legal department in an already conservative organization that is designed to measure risk? How do you overcome the psychological barriers of both individuals and groups in order to effectuate meaningful change? We sought our answers from a wide range of experts and share below neuroscience-based techniques (classification, safety, and support) from sources that helped us successfully navigate implementing legal innovation that aligned with our strategy.

Author’s note: We share a lot of content in our organization, none better than ‘Steal like an Artist’ by Austin Kleon who points out that there are very few original ideas. We will do our best to credit the ideas below where we can and impart universal concepts fairly, but we do not claim to be wicked smart professors who have all the answers and are lecturing from the front of a tiered classroom.

Classification: Innovators and Protectors

You will broadly find two equally important groups within your own work environment, typically classified as innovators and protectors. Through classification, you can better understand how to approach and harness the capabilities of both groups and facilitate change. The innovators will create, foster and thrive on new and ambitious ideas while the protectors will defend the status quo and prevent loss.

Honor the ideas of the innovators by clearly defining goals and objectives that can quantify the impact of their contributions. Harness the innovator’s energy to support your department’s vision but be aware of attempts to hijack your strategic plan for their own agenda, as this could derail progress. Engage the innovators and align their energy with the larger strategy your leadership has set for your organization. If you don’t, the people who you thought might be your biggest allies could turn into your biggest headache. In the end, assume positive intent with your innovators and let them have a voice within a structure.

Listen carefully to the concerns of the protectors by recognizing the pressures of cost containment, technology limitations, and the need for meaningful use cases. You must also make the protectors aware of the dangers of not moving forward at all, potentially resulting in a loss in market share or competitive advantage. It is critical to understand why a protector’s “fence” may have been put up in the first place. This is stressed in a principle called Chesterton’s Fence. In Chesterton’s 1929 book, The Thing, he describes the case of reformers (innovators) who notice something, such as a fence, and fail to see the reason for its existence. Before they decide to remove it, they must figure out why it exists in the first place. If they do not do this, they are likely to do more harm than good with its removal. It is a straightforward principle, but one that is often not considered by a team of eager innovators.Many of the problems we face in a legal system or highly regulated business occur when we intervene without an understanding of what the consequences might be. If a fence exists, there is likely a reason for it. In a nod to the world class design experts at IDEO, we use a Venn diagram to analyze new ideas within existing “fences.” It forces both innovators and protectors to focus on the ideas that will work and uncover what will have the greatest impact and chance at success. When looking at a new idea, examine the feasibility (technical and regulatory), desirability (will they use it) and viability (financial resources) of the project. You will find that innovators thrive on desirable projects, whereas protectors often bring up technical and financial constraints. In order to execute on innovative projects, you will need to meet all three requirements.

Creating Safety: Threat vs. Safety

When you encounter something new, your brain is alerted, neurons are activated, and hormones are released as you try and figure out what the new thing is. If you think the new item is dangerous (maybe because it changes the way you work), then your reaction may be a threat response with a fight or flight trigger. In order to minimize a threat response in your stakeholder’s reaction to a new idea or initiative, you need to create a culture of psychological safety and trust. There are various models that help facilitate trust in the workplace, including David Rock’s SCARF model. The SCARF model emphasizes the importance of recognizing a job well done, independence and autonomy, building strong team relationships, fairness and transparency to achieve a sense of reward.

Creating this environment encourages everyone to take calculated risks and share in the process of innovation. For example, introducing a new technology vendor, even one that you feel will be beneficial for your stakeholders, may threaten their autonomy or create ambiguity for them without establishing trust. By implementing “Vendor Days” (in which one or more vendors can explain their services in a casual setting) in our department, we share new legal service models and technology with senior managers, influencers, and individual contributors in a format that allows for self-discovery. Providing an open forum for learning about a potential vendor allows stakeholders to relate to the opportunity on their own terms and feels far more collaborative. The vendor can focus on presenting information and capabilities, and answering questions, rather than attempting to be purely persuasive. Making a connection between the benefits of the new technology and the stakeholder’s own work product is powerful and often results in a request to partner in the implementation (pull) rather than requiring pursuit of an implementation (push) because a threat response may have been created. This dynamic eliminates the idea that only one team or one person has innovative ideas to push on the department and instead establishes that ideas can be pulled from all areas and levels far more successfully and in a way that allows for meaningful adoption and effective deployment of new technology.

Support: Alone and Together

Collaboration between innovators and protectors and creating a culture of psychological safety depends upon people working together. But for people to work together successfully, you need to nurture the individual. If you have been exposed to a psychology class, you are likely aware of the popular theory of Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs” from his book Theory of Human Motivation. Maslow’s Hierarchy (see insert) is a tiered system of needs beginning with basic survival then ascending through freedom from fear, social belonging, and self-esteem towards the end goal of self-actualization.

When considered relative to the workplace, motivation often increases as needs at each ascending level are met. In a professional work environment, we can concentrate primarily on self-esteem and self-actualization through respect and personal growth. This is where accomplished professionals thrive. At the apex of the triangle, individuals find themselves motivated to come up with new ideas to help others, the department, and the team.

Innovation may start with a single individual, but it is a team sport. All too often when someone tries to facilitate change on their own before they achieve buy-in from others, they fail. It is not necessarily that the individual is wrong to try, it just might be that their idea or the concept that they are trying to implement needs to mature. If the idea is too fragile and not enough people have gotten behind it, the idea will likely get destroyed by others. In order to grow these ideas into fruitful use cases, you must leverage diversity of thought and bring in different perspectives to analyze and strengthen the idea. One way we look to create a culture of diverse thought is through our “Design Challenges.” These day-long sessions promote human centered design and focuses on users, their issues, daily activities and goals through an empathetic lens. Many ideas presented at these events start with an individual thought but are made better through the collective experience. While these sessions occasionally lead to new creative solutions that are incorporated into department strategies, the participants are always left feeling more collaborative and motivated.

We have shared just a few of the ways we have found success implementing innovative change within a legal environment. We absolutely fell and skinned our knees along our journey, as you will. But with each fall there was a lesson and new perspective on how to move forward. There are a multitude of ways to improve the psychological safety of your employees, humble inquiry being among the best and least threatening way to get people to come to understand a problem from a new perspective. People tend to thrive when you seek to understand them and the first step before modifying any aspect of a system is to understand it. Don’t remove that “fence” before you know why it was there in the first place. Only then can you credibly propose your change. In the next 90 days, we challenge you to adopt one of these techniques and observe the results. If you do, we guarantee you will be pleased.

May 2020| Rachita Maker, Vice President, Chief of Staff and Head of Legal Operations, Tata Communications Limited

Do any lawyers remember going to law school and hearing the words “project management”? I certainly did not, and I suspect most of my colleagues didn’t either. It is a different world now with a number of institutes focusing on Legal Project Management and I see there are multiple courses available on the topic. Legal Project Management or LPM is an identified functional area in The CLOC Core 12 for Legal Operations, therefore, identified as a key skill for the legal operation professional.

I chanced upon project management purely by accident in my fifth year as a lawyer. Overnight, I was handed a high-volume complex contract management project with a tight deadline. In an instant, I was made responsible for a team of twenty bright, young lawyers who were relying on me to give them guidance; a demanding client who had expectations beyond the project scope; a deliverable that I had no idea on how to execute; and a management team that wanted me to make the whole thing work. No pressure? To tell the truth, I loved the challenge and still do today.

So, for all the lawyers or legal operations professions who get thrown into large engagements or complex implementation projects, with no one to tell them how it is done – I am sharing a few of the strategies I have forged over many years of managing projects successfully in the legal services industry.

Overview of Legal Project Management

My experience has taught me to view project management as having four pillars – client management, delivery management, team and stakeholder management, and financial management.

Projects within the legal industry could include large scale contract lifecycle management implementations including data migration from old systems to new, obligations management, M&A due diligence, contract drafting and negotiations engagements, and 50-state regulatory research to name a few. Typical challenges in legal projects relate to: scope; balancing the right number resources while ensuring subject matter expertise; maintaining quality; anticipating and mitigating risks; anticipating changes in projects due to unforeseen circumstances like regulatory changes, changes in production timeline or changes in client requirements and unresponsive clients.

Below is my advice for transitioning from a great lawyer to a successful project manager that no one spoke about in law school:

1. Understand the “pulse” of your client
Understanding the “pulse” of your client – in other words, learning what they value most in the delivery of a project and why – is the key to any successful client-provider relationship. No matter what happens, you should be the go-to person for your client. Set up a communication schedule that matches your client’s needs and try to anticipate what they might need next.

I start any large project by identifying what is most critical to my client. Sometimes it is quality; other times it is timeline; and all too often it is cost. While most clients will say that ALL of those factors are equally important, there is usually one aspect that stands out as the priority.

For example, in a 50-state regulatory research project where timing is of the essence for your client, spending too much time ensuring you have researched every angle and missing the expected deadline will likely leave you with an unhappy client. In this example, setting realistic expectations up front on how the research might be restricted to meet the timeline would likely have led to the client suggesting more specific instructions to provide better focus for the research. As you build trust through a series of meetings and in meeting mutually agreed-upon expectations, the client will start to see you as an extension of their team.

The best way to set and adjust expectations is to create a regular cadence of communications that matches your client’s style. As lawyers, we tend to get so involved in our work that we wait to go to the client with our final “masterpiece”. There is nothing worse for a client than not knowing how their project is progressing. I recommend having at least a once a week check-in call, email or meeting. Depending on the timeline and scale of the project, you may want to have more frequent, shorter, or more casual conversations to establish rapport with your client. These meetings are also a great way to learn about the client and anticipate their upcoming needs.

2. Manage “scope creep”
For your clients and for your organization, success is most often measured in financial terms. As project managers, you manage the budget by avoiding “scope creep” – in other words, ensuring that the requirements of a project have not unnecessarily expanded, making the project more expensive than anticipated. Scope changes are easier to identify if a client makes explicit changes to the deliverables or timing of the project; but in practice, small accretive changes are made in smaller bits and become difficult to quantify – in other words, they creep up until the project is ultimate off-budget.

Managing scope begins even before a project starts. As more clients now want fixed pricing or alternate pricing models for projects, the days of hourly billing have almost disappeared. Clients routinely ask for a quote without giving, or sometimes not knowing, any details around the project. Imagine a template harmonization project for a large multinational company – at a minimum, it would help to know how many templates, across how many geographies, the number of business units with overlapping templates, etc. Even if you are able to get some of this information in advance, chances are that you will get answers in approximates, but the client will demand certainty on pricing. It is important to define the project scope to the best of your ability and build in strong assumptions to protect your client and your organization.

Even with the best planning, scope creep can continue through the life of the project and often happens in short bursts. Since we are anxious to maintain good client relationships and we want to earn their business, we tend to overlook the scope creep issues, often leading to unanticipated bills to the client or unsustainably low margins for your organization. I recommend logging all requested changes, no matter how small they seem at the time, and their potential impact on the project. Assess these impacts with your clients and organization at regular intervals in order to anticipate any potential changes in cost or timing. Your clients will appreciate the open communication. The alternative, which is not mentioning scope changes until it is too late, can chip away at trust with your client and your organization.

3. Measure and meet your client’s quality and timeline expectations
As lawyers, we are trained to provide high-quality work product. After all, our work product is the showcase of our talent. While it is easy to control our own deliverables and quality, it can be difficult to be responsible for what someone else is producing. The truth is that as project managers, we are responsible for the overall quality of the project. For example, whether you are overseeing 5 people working on an M&A transaction or 30 people working on a document review, you will need to ensure that quality and the timeline are met by the entire team working together.

The first step to providing quality work is to define and measure what quality means to the client. Work with your client to define quality metrics and then track them. As a project manager one should be able, at any point in time, to confidently talk about the “quality percentage” of their engagements. Tracking quality through pre-defined metrics also helps project managers identify if issues are related to a particular person or if those issues are general across the team.

While high-quality work is expected, most legal projects are deadline-driven, whether it is a deadline related to production, regulatory demands or a transaction. As lawyers, we are used to burning the midnight oil to meet our deadlines and produce the best output we can. The challenge is to help your project team stay motivated to work the extra hours when large deadlines are looming. In order to minimize all-nighters or unsustainable work hours, as well as to avoid any curveballs that may come up in a project, I usually try to build a buffer in project timelines. For example, if I have a 4-week project that needs about ten people, I will staff it with twelve people instead and set an internal timeline of 3 weeks so that I can conduct last minute checks, conduct quality review and make changes that may have come up during the life of the project.

4. Build and maintain reports that your clients and management will value
Maintaining daily, weekly and monthly reports on your engagements will benefit both your clients and your organization. As a project manager you are expected to have a real-time understanding of project metrics – whether they relate to number of documents, hours worked on the project, throughput per hour, quality measures and any other information that can be sliced and diced.

I recommend updating clients and other stakeholders with progress reports. It helps to understand your client and stakeholder communication styles and timing, and to set expectations upfront. Weekly, or sometimes daily, reports may be needed. I was once working on a project that I knew was VERY important to my CEO, and I wanted to make sure he wouldn’t wake up in the middle of the night and worry about where we were on the project. I proactively set up daily reports, and it worked wonderfully to keep my CEO updated and comfortable with the project.

There are a number of tools and technologies that can help you track the progress and performance of your project. Using automated workflow tools, you can generate delivery dashboards, quality metrics, monthly information reports, etc. These tools help you collect analytics on each activity of your project. For longer-term engagements, I have also seen the Balanced Score Card approach work beautifully with clients, as they can see a holistic view of the team’s performance based on operational and delivery excellence, client satisfaction and additional value by way of innovation. As lawyers, we are not always proficient with tools and technology in the market place, but as good project managers we need to identify the best-suited person in our team who can support us in generating and maintaining reports.

5. Invest in your team’s growth
A colleague of mine once said, “After a certain point in your career, it isn’t what your boss thinks of you, but what your team thinks of you,” and I totally agreed with her. Your team is a testament of you. A great project manager knows how to get buy-in from the team, give them the right training and resources, challenge them and use their strengths to the fullest. I try to build my project teams with complementary personality types to provide balance. No one person can do everything and most project managers think that the burden of performance is on them. The truth is that we should use our team’s strength to the fullest – this not only helps them to enhance their skills and helps them feel vested, but also takes some of the burden off our shoulders.

Remember that no matter how much you plan, there are things that may be out of your control. Great project managers focus on what is in their control, escalate what is not, identify risks early on and mitigate them to the best of their ability. As lawyers and professionals, we juggle multiple projects every day, and effective project management will help us stay organized.

The Vital Role Of Reporting For Legal Operations

Easy to use, clear and comprehensive reporting functionality has evolved from an added bonus to a must-have requirement for corporate legal teams when evaluating legal technology. The pressure on legal operations to demonstrate improvements and return has led to reporting features being almost as important as the fundamental benefits of the software tool in use.

Where legal operations is missing a trick is when data analysis from a particular tool is used in isolation. To use legal spend management software as an example, out-of-the-box spend reports and user-friendly analytics wizards allow legal departments to monitor work in progress, measure actual spend, and forecast budgets accurately.

That’s not to say legal spend data isn’t useful on its own. On the contrary, legal operations teams use spend data to make better matter resourcing decisions, negotiate discounts, get more value from firms, and hire more internal staff.

Combining Legal Data To Better Manage Risk

Where the in-house legal function is working closely and in partnership with the business units across the company, the range of information and data it holds will often put it in a unique position within the organisation. This data not only supports an awareness of what the business is doing but also forms part of the historic corporate knowledge that is built up over the years; such as previous contracts, decisions and outcomes. Historically, this information was not held in a structured electronic format, which meant any form of data and trend analysis, as well as knowledge management, was extremely manual and time consuming.

With the increase in legal matter management and legal spend management solutions as well as better document search and retrieval there is a growing need and clamour for data processing, data analysis and knowledge management. Capturing basic contract terms and/or details of legal opinions in a matter management system provides a very simple knowledge management tool and a rich source of data. Other tools that will help provide data are any solutions used to create standard contracts, access to benchmark reports, as well as internal resources (finance reports etc.).

Those legal operations teams that are seeing the most value are those that combine data from various technology tools to take their strategic input to the next level. One such area is management and mitigation of risk.

A legal operations team that is carrying out data analysis on all the data at its disposal will be in a position to identify trends that will lead to a range of questions that should spark further debate, such as;

• How much work is done “in-house” versus being sent externally?
• Are the correct processes being followed?
• Are we getting the right level of technical support for the type of transaction?
• Is there a growth in the types of transactions either at a business unit or country level?
• Is one firm being used more than others for similar types of transaction from a particular part of the business / legal team?
• How does the firm perform against others for similar types of transaction both on price and performance?
• How does the business differ to market peers?
• What is required to manage a specific regulatory change?
• Is the in-house legal function and its staff compliant with the relevant regulatory authority guidelines, such as the Solicitor Regulation Authority (SRA) etc.?

Below are some examples of how the answers to these questions could demonstrate a change in the risk profile and risk appetite.

By monitoring the volumes of work, what type of work is being done, who is doing it (in-house lawyers, external lawyers or a combination of both), the time taken, the costs etc. the legal operations teams will be better placed to advise on the organisational design, support and management of the legal function as well as the risk profile and the risk appetite of the legal function and in certain cases, the supported businesses.

A better understanding of what is being done and by whom, will help ensure that the legal function is properly resourced, is not taking on activities that are better placed in other parts of the organisation, and that the appropriate processes and procedures are in place and controls are being administered. For the legal function and its in-house staff, this might include ensuring that they are complying with the rules of the governing bodies such as the SRA, NALP, the Federal Bar Association in Germany etc.

Spotting an uplift in a particular type of work (such as litigation) or activity (such as drafting) could indicate a lack of understanding of the contract terms within the business front line areas who are requesting contract changes, bad working practices, poor standard documentation, or changes in the markets and/or economic climate (each of which also presents opportunities). Legal operations teams can help to mitigate these by highlighting trends and ensuring that the legal function;

• Delivers better training and communication to the business and legal function
• Carries out regular reviews of standard documentation,
• Supports reviews of policies, practices and procedures, and
• Develops a better understanding of the market.

Consistent use of one firm over others should provoke questions as to why that firm is being used. It may be that they are very competitive on price or they have the appropriate skill sets. Fixed fee arrangements are increasingly popular, but if the firm is not providing any supporting timekeeper activity data, it becomes difficult to know whether the firm is providing the right level of technical support and whether the fee structure is still fair and balanced. As part of the legal operations team’s vendor management programme, they should ensure that that firms are maintaining the right level of skill sets for the work they are being asked to undertake, as this will help mitigate legal risk caused by a lack of technical knowledge and support. For the more complex deals it would be normal to see more senior lawyers engaged with the matter.

With the increase in cyber security and greater scrutiny by regulators who are starting to require more rapid, robust, evidence-based reporting, the need for greater use of these solutions is becoming more prevalent to avoid data being compromised and fines being levied. Understanding what data has been passed to which supplier helps ensure that those suppliers have appropriate controls in place to manage that information in line with Information Governance and Records Management policies and procedures and that any breaches promptly reported.

It is also worth noting that a lack of data in the legal systems is equally as insightful as it will show where parts of the business and/or legal function are not following agreed practices and procedures. Furthermore, using “gap” reports in the legal systems helps identify problems within the data that will distort any data analysis.

For legal operations teams to deliver process improvements and efficiencies, ensure compliance with policies and regulatory requirements, optimise their spend and manage risk, they should analyse the data that is available to them from all the data sources at their disposal. As they start to analyse all their data, instead of analysing point solution data in isolation, they will start to discover new trends and insights not previously seen or understood.

About BusyLamp

Founded by a team of lawyers and powered by frustrated users of endless spreadsheets and clunky legacy legal tech systems, BusyLamp is the leading SaaS alternative for efficient legal operations. We help legal departments save time, significantly reduce costs, and collaborate more effectively with in-house and outside counsel by simplifying and improving their legal processes. Legal departments leverage our end-to-end solution to improve visibility and efficiency from pitch to completion. Become a member of the BusyLamp user family and take advantage of our sophisticated sourcing, fee tracking, e-billing, matter management and vendor management features, all with powerful reporting and analytics.

www.BusyLamp.com

There is a lot of buzz regarding the change AI is bringing to the legal space–who hasn’t read an article about “robot lawyers” coming to take our jobs? On some level we know this isn’t an accurate forecast, but the media thrives on the vagueness and uncertainty surrounding AI. Meanwhile, it’s often difficult for GCs to determine if a software pitch is the right solution for their legal operation needs.

Some of this interpretative struggle is due to the seemingly endless applications for legal tech solutions. That’s why it is critical to understand that AI brings new processes to the table, but that lawyers and legal professionals will always work in tandem with AI. It’s not humans or machines; it’s “Humans + Machines.”.

What is LIBOR?

In July 2017, the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) announced that by the end of 2021 British banks would no longer be required to submit rates for the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR). This means that LIBOR will play a diminished role in the global financial system going forward, and may disappear altogether.

Ever since that announcement, law firms, corporate legal departments, ALSPs, and everyone in between have been asking: How many of our clients have “LIBOR-infected” contracts? How much money is at stake? How do we prioritize and facilitate re-negotiation and re-papering?

The first hurdle is to identify the LIBOR-infected contracts. After that, teams of lawyers and legal professionals can work on remediation. That’s a two-pronged problem, requiring a two-pronged solution.

Identifying LIBOR Contracts with Machine Learning

Discussing machine learning (ML) solutions brings us back to that “robot lawyers” misunderstanding. A well-trained ML platform will find a lot of relevant data points in a large set of documents and can be adapted and customized with additional ML techniques to meet the unique challenges posed by the LIBOR problem. Designing and building these robust techniques requires strategic planning and communication between various types of subject matter experts . A software development team can build ML algorithms in multiple different ways, but it takes experts in law and finance to fully flesh out all they need from a custom LIBOR analysis tool. Basically, “robot lawyers” don’t exist; effective ML requires a range of human experts to sit down and discuss how best to solve incredibly complex problems in a sophisticated and results-oriented way.

ML is not a conveyor belt where data goes in and perfect results come out. It takes time and iteration. This is actually what makes ML a natural companion discipline for legal: both disciplines require taking in imperfect data, then developing creative and effective solutions with that data.

For example, an ML implementation team handling “LIBOR-infected” contracts must ask whether a few natural language processing (NLP) techniques can find all the required data, or whether more complex vectorization models are needed. Data points are neither simple nor intuitive: spread percentages; governing law clauses; jurisdiction-specific legal language; synonymous or nearly-synonymous terms such as “Eurodollar”; and fallback clauses tied to other reference rates such as SOFR and SONIA.

ML can solve a lot of problems in legal, but sometimes it’s forgotten just how vital the contributions by experts are. At the end of the day, ML is just complex software. ML is only as good as the team that builds it, oversees it, and shepherds its evolution.

Solving LIBOR Remediation with Expert Services

The LIBOR problem requires teams of various specialists. Many organizations already have such teams, or at least a set of processes in place. Service teams from law companies like Elevate must be nimble enough to integrate with clients and their processes in order to augment what is already there. A client may not want to use ML, but an outside services team may recognize the potential for ML deployment or see that it is wiser to simply ramp up the human review team.

Either way, for an acute problem such as LIBOR, a services team must bring necessary resources, processes, and technology to their client’s team, and help deliver efficiency and cost savings in four major ways: quantification, action planning, remediation, and reporting.

Quantification

To properly determine the level of repapering a client needs to remain compliant and reduce risk, any outside services team should know how to quantify their client’s LIBOR exposure with a full historical assessment of the contract paper in question.

This initial quantification is effort-intensive, which is why many organizations bring in the efficient expertise found in law companies. Moving fast and iterating is just as important for AI developer teams as it is for a specialized services team.

Quantification efforts will typically include:

• Scoping
• Targeting data repositories for relevant contract data
• Identifying the contracts most impacted by LIBOR (perhaps using a platform like ContraxSuite)
• Reviewing and summarizing contract information for further analysis
• Working with a client’s pre-existing methodologies to provide internal stakeholders with the clearest picture: which agreements are impacted, their level of exposure, and actions needed

Action Planning

After quantification comes the action plan. For a services team, this may mean:

• Supporting Legal Project Managers as they help their teams map out necessary steps and delegate tasks
• Coordinating parties for effort estimates and accountability
• Identifying, assisting, and leveraging third parties (e.g., outside counsel, law companies, technology providers, and/or experts)
• Building consensus and internal buy-in for final action plan

Remediation

After quantification and action planning, it’s time to finalize the review and tally up the contracts that require remediation. The following are five general types of remediation:

• Level 1: Tracking all “no action” contracts
• Level 2: Notification (outgoing) of LIBOR rate transition
• Level 3: Notification and simple remediation of contract (no countersignature required)
• Level 4: Notification and simple remediation of contract (countersignature required)
• Level 5: Notification and full remediation of contract

To assist with the facilitation and resolution of these items, organizations will most likely need to hire temporary contractors or outsource the remediation process to a legal service provider.

Reporting

Throughout the process, it is important for legal teams to be aware of the progress being made, agreements pending, agreements remediated, cycle time, type of remediation, etc. A good services team knows how to support the management, tracking, and presentation of reports for internal stakeholders, ensuring accuracy on scope, quality, and budget over time. Again, the use of AI tools by a services team can take this even further, providing deeper data- based insights for future projects.

Conclusion

“Humans + Machines” is better than humans or machines by themselves. We have delivered contract insights on existing and remediated agreements, using the specialized skills of our services teams, and powerful software tools like contract analytics platforms that sift through thousands of LIBOR-infected contracts. The current centrality of the LIBOR problem is just one of the many examples of “Humans + Machines” completing high-quality enterprise legal work. It will only get better from here.

About Elevate

Elevate is a law company, providing consulting, technology and services to law departments and law firms. The company’s multi-disciplinary team of legal professionals, business professionals, and technology professionals extend and enable the resources and capabilities of customers worldwide. Learn more at elevateservices.com.

As the calendar flips over to 2020, many in the financial services industry are hearing the steady tic toc of the LIBOR clock counting down to 2021 when LIBOR becomes an obsolete reference rate.

Countless contracts and automation processes include LIBOR as a reference rate and over $350 trillion or more than £240 worth of financial agreements reference LIBOR — with more being created despite the looming change. Regardless of these numbers and clear warnings from regulatory bodies and other industry experts to prepare now and not delay, many organisations do not have an articulate transition plan.

Most organisations have begun to assemble multiple internal stakeholders to ascertain the best way to manage the transition. It is not too late to form a LIBOR Task Force, which should also include retained 3rd party providers that bring the expertise needed to develop and manage a transition plan. Executive support and input on Task Force prioritisations are essential and will help to eliminate any roadblocks as the project progresses. In addition, a Program Manager should be assigned supported by, in most cases, several project managers as there are typically multiple work streams requiring oversight. With the right team and project management, a seasoned Program Manager is able to oversee several projects at once, ensure accountability, and meet agreed upon milestones. Organisations that do not have a Program Manager need to fill this essential role immediately. In addition, strong communication at every step of the process cannot be stressed enough and will be a major factor in determining the project’s overall success.

Part of preparedness also means gaining an up-front understanding of the full impact and ramifications of this change. There are many known and unknown variables, ranging from the effect on balance sheets, potential stress scenarios as a result of new reference rates, as well as addressing client response. Whilst many contracts and legal documents contain fallback provisions if LIBOR becomes unavailable, since LIBOR is generally for floating rate transactions and SOFR, SONIA and others apply to fixed rate transactions, it can leave organisations open to potential financial and reputational damages, especially if risk is not properly managed.

Understanding the reverberations before-the-fact is one of the most challenging aspects of any LIBOR transition plan. To pave the way for an informed, cost effective, and streamlined path to compliance that has little to no impact on business as usual, organisations should consider the taking the following steps:

• Assess: Determine any anticipated risks or challenges. To assist in this process, Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools in conjunction with experienced resources can identify what must be transitioned and what supporting materials need to be developed (documentation, systems, fallback provisions, standard operating procedures, limiting new transactions, training, etc.). AI and enhanced machine learning are highly effective in identifying active agreements and pinpointing their contents. This is a complex process that requires both human and technology resources.
• Prioritise: Identify potential issues and bottlenecks so they can preemptively be addressed and remedied. Six Sigma trained resources and applied principles can be highly advantageous during this phase of the project.
• Strategise: Establish a comprehensive and detailed roadmap complete with specific steps, stakeholders, vendors, resources, and procedures. Ultimately, the success of the project will, in large part, be determined by the quality of this plan which should include standardised approaches/playbooks for legal document drafting, remediation, amendment, and outreach.
• Execute: Execution is everything. Deploying the strategy in a streamlined, sensible and diligent way is the final step toward transition. Tracking to the strategic plan will ensure all milestones and objectives are met and compliance is achieved.

No plan can fully anticipate every roadblock or challenge. That is why the transition team must remain nimble; able to pivot and adjust prioritisations as new information and potential risks are uncovered. Paramount to successful execution is also well-articulated communications plan and function, along with rigorous calendar management to ensure all stakeholders are informed and contributors are held accountable.

A well-conceived plan will include the use of third party resources including technology solutions and alternative legal service providers (ALSP). As noted, successful execution will be delivered by a combination of human resources and technology. ALSPs like Integreon are instrumental in working with clients to expertly handle the vast amounts of documentation (contracts, prospectuses, and other legal documentation, as well as marketing collateral and product details) that requires remediation. Any mention of LIBOR as a reference rate must be replaced with agreed upon new language. Some may consider using a law firm for this work, though they may find the price tag to be cost-prohibitive. In addition, law firms do not typically handle, nor are they resourced to handle this manner of project. On the other hand, this is right in the wheelhouse of most ALSPs who ideally will bring deep expertise, access to a large pool of experienced resources, and the technology relationships required to galvanise and execute successfully.

In 2020, financial institutions need to make a New Year’s resolution to start the LIBOR transition process. Although 2021 may seem like a long way away, there is clearly much to be done to fully understand the size of the challenge, properly resource, develop a sound plan, and efficiently execute. Happy New Year and here’s to a happy and healthy LIBOR transition starting…now!

About Integreon

Integreon is a trusted, global provider of award-winning legal and business solutions to leading law firms, corporations and professional services firms. We apply a highly trained, experienced staff of 2,400 associates globally to a wide range of problems that require scale and expertise, enabling clients to become more operationally efficient by streamlining operations, maximizing investment and improving the quality of work they provide their end clients. With delivery centers on three continents, Integreon offers multi-lingual, around-the-clock support, as well as onshore, offshore and onsite delivery of our award-winning services. Visit us at CLOC London on January 20-21 at table 25.

Jenita Gillespie is Director of Legal Operations at Bon Secours Mercy Health. While she was originally hired as a Paralegal eight years ago, her personal path to the directorship is also the story of the transformation of legal operations at Ohio’s largest healthcare provider – a story that highlights the successes that can come with implementing strong, data-driven processes. We recently had the privilege of sitting down with Jenita to discuss how she was able to drive this transformation so other legal departments can learn from her story.

How the Legal Operations Function Evolved

When Jenita joined Mercy Health – prior to its merger with Bon Secours in September 2018 – there was no legal operations department. Using her background in billing for law firms, she began closely analyzing the bills coming into the Mercy Health legal department and realized the department was being overcharged in some cases. While her supervisor initially dismissed her claims, Jenita was able to present data that identified clear discrepancies between what some law firms and technology vendors billed for and the services they actually provided.

After presenting her findings, Jenita began to advocate for a more systematic approach to billing and other operational functions at the Mercy Health. Leadership agreed, and she was asked to oversee the implementation of a legal process management system that integrated data from a variety of applications across the organization. Implementation of that system, which made it much easier for Mercy Health to track, analyze and manage work across multiple workflows, generated initial savings of $1.25 million, and Jenita was subsequently promoted to Manager of Legal Information Systems.

Jenita was thinking well beyond solving the department’s immediate billing issues and began to focus on developing more effective processes in other areas like vendor management and financial management. She gradually began to implement a series of process improvements. One of these improvements was establishing strict guidelines and procedures ensuring that every outside counsel fee arrangement had to be approved by the legal operations department before billing, and that any work billed by outside counsel that had not come from legal would not get paid.

With fee approvals done by legal operations and data from the legal process management system, Jenita’s team was able to carefully monitor bills coming from outside counsel and quickly identify previously unrecognized patterns in billing practices. She was able to catch inconsistent pricing and unreasonable increases that had been overlooked, and decided to implement billing violations to ensure the department would no longer be overcharged.

With increasing visibility into legal spend, she gathered data related to real estate matters and determined the company’s spending well above market rates. Her data and reporting convinced leadership that Mercy Health could spend a quarter of what they were paying to outside counsel by hiring an in-house lawyer to handle real estate. When Jenita discovered that other firms were also failing to bill market rates for other practice areas, she was able to negotiate outside counsel rates down hundreds of dollars per hour in some instances.

With examples like these, and with her entire department adhering to the streamlined procedures she developed, Jenita was able to get support from the Chief Legal Officer of Mercy Health and the finance department to maintain consistency and efficiency in workflows and financial management.

As Jenita’s work expanded to areas like technology and process support, data analytics and business/operations reporting, she petitioned for another promotion to accommodate all her new responsibilities. After consulting resources from the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC), she determined the role of Director of Legal Operations encapsulated all that she did, and delivered that job description to her supervisor, who then approved. While CLOC resources were not responsible for Jenita’s promotions, they did give her a more comprehensive view of legal operations, which she was able to communicate to leadership. The resources also helped her show leadership how streamlined, effective and efficient the legal department could be with a legal operations director implementing a strict, data-based approach to process and workflow refinements and providing continuous oversight.

What’s Next for Legal Operations?

Jenita not only discovered new ways to manage spend and streamline processes for the for Mercy Health’s legal department, but she also found additional savings and efficiencies through the company’s merger with Bon Secours – integrating the companies’ information systems and legal operations workflows in just six months. Jenita’s story is an example of what’s possible with the right resources, data and technology. Law departments worldwide should carefully consider how a more systematic approach to legal operations can help them achieve substantial cost savings and efficiency improvements. What was possible for Mercy Health’s law department is achievable for others. Data-based processes and decision-making – driven by go-getters like Jenita – represent a promising way forward for legal departments.

Aaron Pierce is vice president & general manager of LexisNexis CounselLink.

As an important aspect of vendor management, outside counsel billing guidelines are a foundational element of the CLOC Core Competencies. Billing guidelines are one of the key components of good, strong relationships with vendor partners—but sometimes those partners miss the mark by engaging in common billing violations that could hurt your organisation.

Unfortunately, corporate legal departments (CLDs) are all too familiar with this challenge. As billing guidelines become more complex, CLDs are discovering more guideline violations from their outside counsel, some of which can be hard to spot with manual invoice review processes. Often these violations are inadvertent, and the law firm may not even realise that they’re out of compliance with your guidelines. Meanwhile, the CLD is subjected to spend leakage that can result in the loss of millions of dollars per year.

That’s a problem, especially when general counsel around the world are increasingly expected to run their CLDs like a business unit. Corporate legal teams need mechanisms to help them easily identify where the leakage is coming from, and when a billing violation has taken place.

Look for These Typical Violations

It helps to be able to identify the most common violations and their potential impact on the organisation. According to data derived from Wolters Kluwer’s ELM Solutions’ LegalVIEW® BillAnalyzer data, here are five violations that can have a direct impact on CLDs’ bottom lines:

Block billing: Block billing homogenises multiple tasks into a single billing entry. Block billing makes it difficult to correlate work to specific matters. That, in turn, makes it tough to discern how long it took to complete a particular task—a useful guideline that CLDs can use to estimate the length of time and money that should be allocated for similar projects in the future.

Vague task descriptions: Lawyers tend to like a lot of detail in everything, including the invoices they receive. Invoices with vague descriptions lack specificity about the purpose of the tasks completed. Phrases such as “case management,” “attention to file,” or “prepared for staff meeting” billed for 12 hours obscure the details of the work done and can make it difficult to reconcile timekeeping hours or determine compliance with billing guidelines. Ambiguous billing descriptions cannot fully illustrate the connection between the work your outside counsel is doing and the value that they’re adding (or not adding). All of which hurts your ability to display accountability to your organisation’s C-suite.

Violation of core billing guidelines: Certain line items may not follow a CLD’s core billing guidelines. Examples can include duplicate or excessive line item charges, up billing (rounding up time entries to the hour or half-hour, rather than in increments of 1/10 of an hour, which can lead to overbilling), or anything else that may be considered in conflict with the CLDs’ billing policies.

Matter management: Matter management violations occur when a firm disregards a CLD’s alternative fee arrangements or flat fees for a specific matter, or when they bill to the wrong matter. Often, these violations are completely unintentional, but they must be flagged to ensure billing is attributed to the appropriate matter and adheres to whatever fee arrangement is in place.

Late invoices: CLDs are being asked to become highly assiduous when it comes to controlling spend and budgets. Prompt payment of invoices helps keep things on track from a financial perspective. Unfortunately, many firms do not issue invoices on time, often waiting 31 days or more to send out bills. Just as in one’s personal life, a late bill is often considered a surprise bill, and a delayed legal invoice can create challenges for CLDs that are trying to effectively track, budget and plan their expenses.

Bill review processes that use technology to automate and analyse invoice data can flag potential violations and improve compliance with greater speed and accuracy. CLDs can be alerted to potential discrepancies quickly to avoid revenue leakage and maximise their ability to become profit centers for their companies.

If you’d like to learn more about current priorities and trends among general counsel and legal departments, see this summary of the GC Barometer 2019 findings.

About Wolters Kluwer

Wolters Kluwer’s ELM Solutions is the market-leading global provider of enterprise legal spend and matter management, contract lifecycle management and legal analytics solutions. We provide a comprehensive suite of tools that address the growing needs of corporate legal operations departments to increase operational efficiency and reduce costs. Corporate legal and insurance claims departments trust our innovative technology and end-to-end customer experience to drive world-class business outcomes. The award-winning products include Passport®, the highest rated ELM solution in the latest Hyperion MarketView™ Legal Market Intelligence Report; TyMetrix® 360°, the industry’s leading SaaS-based e-billing and matter management solution; CLM Matrix, named a “strong performer” in the 2019 Q1 CLM Forrester Wave report; and the LegalVIEW® portfolio of legal analytics solutions based upon the industry’s largest and most comprehensive legal spend database, with more than $130 billion in invoices.