Brought to you by the CLOC Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging Council 

Fewer in-house legal departments are making law firm diversity information a high priority when deciding to hire outside counsel.  17% in 2023 reported it as a high priority versus 23% in 2022, according to the Thomson Reuters Institute Law Department Operations. In addition, 39% reported in 2023 that their in-house functions had a diversity initiative in place compared to 47% in 2022. This apparent reduction in priority has more to do with a fast-changing and dynamic risk landscape and regulatory framework and less to do with D&I lessening as a priority. Indeed, the importance of D&I as a main source of talent attraction is not going away soon. So, how can legal departments provide ongoing efficiency in the operations of legal functions as the scope of their responsibilities expands, while at the same time continue to drive efficiency in outside counsel D&I metrics and reporting?  What tools are the most useful?  In this session, you will hear from two legal ops professionals on the innovative practices and tools they are using to ensure their D&I initiatives remain a high priority amongst an ever-increasing workload.   

Rates are still going up: the recent State of the Legal Market report from the Thomson Reuters Institute shows that negotiated rates rose 6% in 2023, for the fifth straight year of major increases. In-house counsel are responding with better tools and more data to manage spending.  Beyond that, some are aggressively moving work to smaller or cheaper firms. 

But how do you ensure that you’re getting quality work and consistent outcomes when increasing efficiency? And how do you manage the relationship with those big firms that are now getting a smaller piece of the pie, but still handling your most important, bet-the-business work? 

Join us for a webinar with Thomson Reuters that will discuss both what data-driven matter pricing looks like, and how to get there. An expert panel will cover: 

• Why RFPs are vital, and how to use them well. 
• How automation can help price individual matters consistently. 
• Introducing competition to drive cost and performance benefits. 
• Using spend and outcome data effectively. 
• Managing change within your department and with outside counsel. 
• Making clear comparisons among hourly rates, AFAs and other options. 

Presented by

The 2023 CLOC Global Institute provided a great opportunity to connect with legal operations professionals and listen to them talk about what they are looking for in their legal ops solutions. We were also pleased to host a panel session called “Reaching the Summit on Legal Spend” featuring Ryan O’Leary, Research Director, Privacy and Legal Technology at ICD and Stacy Lettie Chief of Staff to the GC and Director of Strategic Planning at Organon, along with Jeff Solomon, our Vice President and Segment Leader for LegalVIEW® BillAnalyzer.

For those who were not able to join us, we’re summarizing a couple of highlights from the session. Among the topics our panelists covered, three of the most compelling for the audience were the discussions on billing guidelines, vendor management, and artificial intelligence.

Billing guideline enforcement

Billing guidelines are an important tool for legal departments seeking to control costs and maximize outside counsel value. When beginning the effort to improve enforcement, legal teams should consider benchmarking their guidelines against industry standards. This can help identify areas where the current guidelines may be lacking. Improving the guidelines themselves will help improved enforcement to deliver even more value.

Legal organizations should also carefully evaluate historical invoices to truly understand what outside counsel firms have been billing for and how well that conforms to the guidelines. This can be a time-consuming project, but it is very important to fully understand the starting point in order to measure the success of the improvement effort later on. The output of this analysis will also be helpful in opening a dialog with law firms about their level of guideline compliance and where they should focus in order to improve it.

Vendor management

An effective program of vendor management leads to positive law firm relationships and well-managed legal spend. Here are two of the keys to successful vendor management, emphasized by our speakers.

Law firm panels: Consolidating the legal department’s work with a select list of firms is essential because it allows the corporate legal team to leverage their spend and improve their buying power. Panel creation is the ideal opportunity to pre-negotiate rates and to ask for the billing discount you want and expect.

Vendor scorecards: Legal operations teams should use a scorecarding tool that facilitates law firm evaluations based on outcomes, as well as more nuanced traits such as billing practices, feedback from business partners, diversity trends, and budget performance. Legal professionals should use these scorecards in annual or biannual meetings with firms and should use them to conduct apples-to-apples comparisons of all the firms they engage.

AI in legal ops

Our speakers encourage the use of artificial intelligence but recommend a well-thought-out approach to the technology. For example, generative AI can be helpful to some legal professionals, but users should never enter sensitive data into large language models (such as ChatGPT) because there is no way to be certain that the service provider will keep it safe.

Also, their recommendation is to look for opportunities for AI to improve existing processes and programs, rather than assuming AI should be leveraged everywhere in the legal department. They suggest developing a gap analysis that can help flag those areas where the organization can get the greatest benefit for the most modest investment.

We are grateful to our guests Stacy Lettie and Ryan O’Leary for helping to make our time at the 2023 CLOC Global Institute such a success. Thanks to everyone who joined us!

About Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions:

Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions is the market-leading global provider of enterprise legal spend and matter management and legal analytics solutions. It provides 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 its innovative technology and end-to-end customer experience to drive world-class business outcomes. The company’s LegalVIEW® Bill Analyzer leverages both artificial intelligence and human expertise to help increase legal billing guideline compliance.

“How do I know I’m getting a good price from my law firms?”

Traditionally, that type of data simply hasn’t been available to in-house teams or firms — a fact that causes widespread discrepancies in cost across the legal industry.

In this article, we’ll show you a process PERSUIT uses to find what we call the “true market price” for a legal matter.

It may seem counterintuitive, but finding a true market price makes the price less important when you select your firm for a matter. By doing so, you can empower your team to better manage risk by choosing the best firm — not just the one with the best rate.

What is a True Market Price?

A “true market price” is the average transaction price that buyers and sellers can commonly be expected to agree upon for a particular good or service. But without transparency and competition within a market — like in legal services — it’s difficult to discover what a true market price actually is.

In legal, that’s starting to change.

In-house teams are under pressure to demonstrate their value to the business more than ever before — and to justify and document their decisions around external spend.

For all these reasons, legal teams are increasingly adopting a new process for engaging outside counsel — one that introduces transparency and competition so a true market price can emerge.

A Four-Step Process to Find the True Market Price for Legal Services

At PERSUIT, we teach in-house teams a process they can use to determine a fair market price for legal services.

Here’s how it works:

Step 1: Segment the matter by milestones and deliverables

Most legal work falls into repeatable patterns. You may not know exactly how a matter will go, but you know the types of activities that often happen.

For example, in litigation, you know there will be depositions, even if you don’t know exactly how many you’ll need. Nearly any matter can be broken down into predictable phases and activities to arrive at the “deliverable” or outcome.

In our litigation example, those milestones and deliverables would include depositions, discovery, pre-trial, trial, appeals, etc. The same concept can be applied to advice or transactional matters as well.

The same holds true even for complex matters such as IP litigation. Certain phases and types of work, like claim construction and the Markman hearing, can be scoped and outlined. It will take some up-front investment, but the process will yield a better environment for competition and transparency with your firms.

Having a library of pre-built templates for many types of matters also helps make the scoping process significantly easier.

Step 2: Invite preferred firms to submit proposals

After you’ve scoped your matter by phase, invite three to four of your preferred firms to submit proposals detailing how they’ll approach the work.

Ask them to submit their price estimate, a summary of how they’ll approach the matter, and any other information you’ll consider when awarding the work (DEI, relevant experience, etc.)

If you’re doing this manually, you can send emails inviting the proposals. Or use a firm relationship platform to simplify the process.

When appropriate, some companies invite bidding firms to ask questions and further scope the matter, helping you ensure a true “apples to apples” comparison when you receive proposals.

Step 3: Use a competitive process

Sometimes, the proposals you receive will have similar price quotes.

In those cases, the competitive RFP process — on its own — has revealed a “true market price.” This gives you confidence that you’re not overpaying for the matter.

There are other cases where you’ll receive proposals with price estimates that are wildly different. In that case, you can’t know if the prices you’re looking at are a true “market price.” It may be that the firms simply don’t know what other firms are charging for similar types of services.

In this scenario, the process we recommend is a “reverse auction” — a competitive process where you set a time window, show the price quotes (or their rankings) you received from firms, then give those firms a chance to revise their price quote.

This is usually done as a live event with a time limit between 30 minutes to an hour.

Here’s an illustration of a real reverse auction taken from the PERSUIT platform.

At the start of the auction, there was a $1.275 million spread between the highest-priced quote and the lowest.

One hour and six minutes later, the price spread had narrowed dramatically, with all four firms having price quotes within $270,000.

In this case, the “true market price” is about $1 million — the price the firms are grouping around at the end of the auction.

Step 4: Choose the firm you think has the best chance of giving you the result you need

At the end of this competitive process, you and your team can evaluate the proposals and make a choice about who to work with for the matter.

It may be counterintuitive, but a competitive process actually makes price less of a factor when choosing a firm.

At the beginning of the auction illustrated above, there was little chance that an in-house team could justify paying an extra $1.275 million to engage with the highest-priced firm competing for the work — unless it was a “bet-the-company” type matter.

By the end of the auction, however, the bid spread had been reduced to only $270,000 between all four firms; even less between the top three.

With the emergence of a true market price for the matter, the decision becomes less about price and more about who is the best team to manage the relative risk and drive the right outcomes.

The Payoff: Make Price Matter Less When Selecting Outside Counsel

Our internal data — which includes over $8 billion in proposals and $1 billion in legal work awarded through the platform — show that time and again the competitive process detailed above takes large price differences out of the equation.

By driving firms closer to a consensus price, or true market value, cost becomes less of a deciding factor than in a traditional RFP process. This price convergence empowers in-house teams to move beyond price in deciding which firm is the best fit based on the things that really matter — experience, strategic insights, diversity and ESG metrics, and more.

You can read more about the benefits of competitive sourcing in our recent report, 5 Myths About Reverse Auctions in Legal. You can also hear about how competitive sourcing strengthens the relationship between in-house teams and their firms in our webinar featuring Gopal Burgher, partner at BurgherGrey, and Kimberly Williams, head of Legal Operations at SMBC.

Ready to uncover the true market price for your matters? Sign up for a demo today.

PERSUIT is used by the world’s leading in-house legal teams to engage outside counsel in a way that’s more fair, more objective, more diverse, more equitable, and more effective for everyone involved. Learn more about PERSUIT.

This guide is intended to provide an overview of the work product developed by the LPM 2.0 committee and to provide the CLOC membership with a guide to implementation of best practices for matter life cycle management incorporating LPM principles. This guide is also designed to be used internally and in collaboration with external resources or vendors.

CLOC members have access to the full collection of artifacts (documents and templates) created by the committee in support of MLM that are outlined in this eBook. The zip file can be downloaded through Community Connect.

Download the eBook PDF

Corporate General Counsel and outside counsel fundamentally want the same thing – to be strategic partners to the organizations they serve. There is, therefore, a strong incentive to work collaboratively towards business outcomes.

Yet relationships with law firms can often become adversarial. Money is a particularly challenging issue. Many clients don’t engage law firms as early as might be ideal (for both sides) because they worry that the law firm will be “on the clock”. At the tail end of an engagement, there is the risk of surprise fees and errors which cause invoices to be challenged.

But why does the money matter so much? Because it’s a barrier. The commercial relationship automatically creates an arms’ length approach and a risk of being transactional, when in fact what every business wants is external advisers who are as connected, capable and proactive as the in-house team. A business wants partners, not service providers.

Moving to, and maintaining, an honest and open relationship therefore requires a proactive approach. It will take effort on both sides to escape the traditional approaches of the past. Here are some practical steps you can take:

1. Act now, because now is the right time

COVID-19 has changed everyone’s expectations overnight. Network Rail GC Dan Kayne commented in our recent webinar, “Conversations are more collaborative; I think there is a much more human approach to what we’re doing. And that’s essential. I don’t think we can allow something of this magnitude to happen and not see a shift in working styles, patterns and behaviors.”

Smart firms are recognizing the inherent value of collaboration itself. Addleshaw Goddard’s Anna Heaton also noted, “One thing we found really useful is to create small communities of GCs and other clients in similar sectors, who then have an outlet to swap ideas and share experiences. What has changed for the positive is that people are much more prepared to collaborate. The need to find answers quickly is so important that they are okay talking to their competitors at the moment, if it’s allowing them to gain more insight for the greater good. I know that sounds somewhat utopian, but I do think there is a genuine change in terms of how people are working together.”

This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to rewrite the rules of collaboration.

2. Invest time in communication

The move from a client-supplier relationship to involving law firms as valued, trusted advisers takes time. It requires law firms to understand their clients’ strategies and priorities. This works both ways though: GCs also need to invest time, by explaining their requirements to outside counsel. Meet your law firms quarterly for an exclusively forward-looking (rather than a business as usual) conversation.

Damian Honey, Partner at HFW, said, “What I’ve found useful is to have fixed, regular meetings across a broad range of skill-sets, that we as a firm are providing to the client; where you can sit down and have an open and honest conversation. Relationships are two way, and we as a law firm can provide constructive feedback as to how the client could be more efficient, but equally, we want to know how we are performing and how we can be more efficient.”

3. Work out loud

Futurist (and former IBM Global Managing Partner) Andrew Grill recently told an Apperio webinar of legal professionals, “You’re probably using tools like Zoom, Slack or Yammer right now. But the way to use them properly is to adopt a methodology called ‘working out loud’. It means talking to our communities and networks about the things we’re working on. That doesn’t mean breaching client confidentiality; it means sharing ideas by default, so that others can chip in with their ideas and contributions. Because your value to an organization isn’t what you know, it’s what you share. In the old days, information was power: I would guard what I was working on, and I would become more powerful. In the new age of work, it’s more important and advantageous to share what you’re doing. That sharing then becomes valuable to the organization.”

Share across the client/provider boundary and you’ll create real partnerships.

4. Set some KPIs

Trust is built on relationships, but also shared expectations. Consider agreeing common goals and related metrics. By acknowledging what’s important to each side, you can build a successful win-win relationship, with quantifiable outcomes. As well as professional and service targets, with fiscal transparency your KPIs can, for example, include the number of matters going over budget and ratio of complaints to open matters.

5. Make time to make contact without an agenda

Dan Kayne commented, “It’s so important to have regular conversations that don’t necessarily worry too much about specific issues – just to check in and see how people are doing. Law firms have often struggled with that historically – they don’t want to waste the time of the GC. But it’s actually quite an important thing to do. People really appreciate when suppliers, particularly partners, as we describe ourselves, take time out to pick up the phone and just say, I know it’s tough for you right now. But we’re here to help.”

6. Get the best minds in the room

For the most part, teams are not refreshed on a regular basis. Many fine legal careers are built on personal relationships, but with a data-driven approach, you can build teams on the basis of the best skill-sets. Recognize that the modern business environment is fast-moving and, as needs on both sides change, different people will be appropriate for different types of work. With the right data, you can broaden your team options; safe in the knowledge that value is being preserved.

7. Use multiple channels

COVID-19 has seen a renewed focus on managing relationships from afar. Email, which allows lawyers to maintain a certain level of control over the dialogue but is not necessarily what’s best for the relationship, had become the default and somewhat “lazy” communication tool.

With inboxes overrun though, lawyers have been forced to adopt new technologies. For example, video conferencing tools have enabled lawyers to fully adapt and substitute non-personal email chains with face-to-face (albeit on a screen) interactions to re-dress and truly strengthen these relationships.

8. Beware of the robots

If you needed a final nudge towards collaboration, Futurist Andrew Grill says, “Any job that can be done by a robot, will be replaced by a robot. What you do must have that extra level of information that comes from intuition.” The transactional aspects of the legal profession will be progressively eaten up by machine learning.

The high-value work that humans can do will either be at the cutting edge of the law, or advisory: engaging professionally as subject matter experts, embedded in the offices, challenges and ambitions of their client businesses.

The future is collaborative, not just because it’s friendly, but because it’s more effective – and the legal sector’s livelihood will one day depend on it. COVID-19 has accelerated our technical skills and therefore our ability to connect on multiple platforms. It will suit both sides to continue to break down those barriers, so that legal professionals can fulfil the strategic advisory role where they are most valuable.

I recently had the privilege of moderating a panel with four legal operations superstars from leading organizations. On the panel were Mark Smolik (GC of DHL Americas), Preston McGowan (Chief Transformation Officer at Goldberg Segalla), Kevin Iredell (Chief Marketing Officer at Lowenstein Sandler) and Chris Ende (Chief Value Officer at Goulston and Storrs).

The central question examined by the panel was whether selection and management of outside counsel should be more relationship-based or more based on “hard” legal ops criteria where success is defined more by hitting objective performance metrics rather than the strength of personal relationships.

The panelists agreed that “pure” relationship-based management is no longer enough. Relationships will always have a place, but there are stakeholders in client organizations (think CFO’s) that are not party to those personal relationships. Those stakeholders want to see objective data that proves that what they are getting is not nepotism, but good quality at a good price. Law firms that think they can ignore the legal ops movement and get by on the strength of personal relationships will lose those relationships. By the same token, GC’s and other top corporate law department folks who do not want to undergo the temporary pain of fixing broken or nonexistent processes will be replaced by people who are on board with legal ops and open to change.

Analytics set firms apart

The above points were underscored by the example one of our panelists gave of an RFP for an important piece of litigation. The company’s tried and true law firms responded with more or less boilerplate responses about how experienced they were, their sterling reputations, etc. However, there was one firm that, rather than bragging about how awesome it was, proved it. Their RFP response was a detailed analysis of the present litigation together with a nationwide analysis of all similar litigation against the company, the judges and plaintiff’s attorneys involved, the status of those cases, and a recommendation of how to proceed with the present case based on that information. When the GC read the response, he instantly knew this was the firm he was going to use.

In the new legal ops-based world, that is the kind of demonstrated operational competence that is going to win work. The panelists, some of the most distinguished names in legal operations from both the law firm and corporate sides, underscored this idea repeatedly by making remarks like the following:

• I am going to hire you because you’ve proven to me using data that you are the best organization to solve my problem, not because you bought me Super Bowl tickets.
• Do not think you are going to get work from my organization because of your legal expertise. Legal expertise is table stakes. I want to hear about things like how you manage to budget, how you use technology, and how you realize diversity.
• Even though I value the personal relationship between us as inside and outside counsel, the reality of today’s marketplace is in five years I may be working somewhere else and so might you. So part of my job is to build a relationship between our two companies so they can continue benefitting each other without a hiccup if either or both of us move on.

Augmenting, not replacing, relationships

From the above, one might conclude, as some legal procurement professionals prematurely did a couple years ago, that “relationships are dead.” But our panelists made it clear that that way of thinking was dead on arrival. Trust matters, just like it always did. History matters. Liking another human being matters. Legal ops hasn’t changed any of that and isn’t really trying to.

In fact, our panelists described the concept of legal ops “vs.” relationship-based management as a false dichotomy. Legal ops discipline, rather than taking away from relationships, is transforming them by putting them into a structure where third parties can see that they are actual businesslike relationships and not just cronyism. Just as law firms who don’t get legal ops will lose client relationships, legal ops folks who take a hardcore “procurement”-type approach will lose law firm relationships when those law firms come to feel they are not being treated as trusted advisors but as commodities. They will take their talents elsewhere.

In conclusion, it’s not relationships VS. structure. It’s relationships AND structure. Human warmth AND process/technology. That is what modern law practice looks like.

When you do an online search for, “what does an in-house legal department look like,” office images show people sitting around a table with laptops, papers, notebooks, pens, etc. None of it looks very technology- or data-driven.

But to anyone who thinks legal departments can’t be data-driven powerhouses, I have one word for you: Moneyball. That’s right, this baseball story is the perfect example of how you can use data-driven decisions—even in the most unconventional places—to drive success.

If you’re a sports fan or like inspiring stories, then you probably already know the story behind Moneyball the book, and later, the movie starring Brad Pitt. Just in case, here’s a quick recap:

When the Oakland A’s General Manager, Billy Beane is challenged with budget constraints, he decides to use deeper, data-driven strategies to recruit undervalued baseball players. Instead of relying on batting average, height, and weight normally associated with certain positions, Beane looked at in-game activity, such as how many times a player made it to base and scored a run. In the end, his data-driven team-building strategy led the Oakland A’s to win a record 20 consecutive games.

So what does all this have to do with legal departments? Billy Beane used data-driven decisions to build a winning team. Turns out, so can legal departments, using data from their vendor management solutions to build a winning team of outside counsel and law firms. In fact, baseball and vendor management overlap in several areas.

Managing Your Vendor Team

Every baseball team has a manager who oversees and is responsible for game strategy, lineup, practice, instruction, and more. Vendor management allows you to be the “team manager” of your vendor lineup with a holistic view and metrics into vendor costs, matter type distribution, efficiency, diversity, timekeeper performance, and more. These detailed metrics help you evaluate, comment, rate, and score firms, giving you the data you need to better manage and evaluate the value you receive from vendors.

Picking the Right Vendor

On a baseball team, all players have their designated position to play—a place on the field where they have proven to excel. With vendor management, you have a structured, data-driven process that shows which vendors excel at which type of legal work. With easy-to-use scorecards, you can quickly identify top, average, and low performers, making it easier to choose your key players.

Working as a Team with Your Vendors

To be successful in baseball, or any sport, the team has to work together as a cohesive unit—collaboration is essential. Vendor management makes it easier to collaborate with outside counsel and firms on matters, invoices, documents, fees, and even early payment terms. As result, you build a team roster of trusted relationships that are productive and rewarding.

From baseball to vendor management, data offers a tangible way to manage, monitor, and measure performance. For a law department, it’s important to build a winning team of vendors that it can count on to deliver results. And today, we have the technology to help in-house legal departments score unlimited homeruns using reliable data from vendor management solutions.

Some small tweaks to your RFP process can make a big difference in your results. Ideally, you want a process that both the buy and sell side find productive and efficient. That’s not always the case in many RFPs we are seeing today. Here are five questions to consider before you hit send that will help you have a better experience.

1. Did we provide the law firm enough time?
   If you are managing a large preferred panel RFP for 10+ practice groups, you should be providing the law firms a minimum of 3 weeks, and 5+ will get you the best responses. Giving a law firm only two weeks to complete a large panel RFP means you will get lower quality, rushed responses thrown together with no cohesion. If you want to ask questions that require partner time to respond to, you need to provide them time to manage their current client workload. If you are issuing a RFP for a specific matter, that’s a different timetable altogether. We typically see anything from 24 hrs to a week or more for matter specific RFPs. A good rule of thumb for the large preferred panel RFPs would be, whatever time you think it will take to add at least another week of cushion to your project schedule.
2. Did we provide ourselves enough time to manage the Q&A process? (Panel RFPs only)
   Some legal departments underestimate the volume of questions they will get back from law firms during the Q&A process when managing an RFP with dozens of firms. Some will be complex questions that will need input from the general counsel or others in the business team and you may have only provided yourself 48 hours in the RFP schedule. Once you commit to answering one, you have to answer all of them. What then happens is law firms often can’t start the response until you have provided answers ultimately leading to an extension needing to be granted.
3. Did we provide enough information?
   If you want a law firm to be able to provide a thoughtful response on a fee proposal, outside counsel guidelines or their recommended legal strategy, you need to provide them with enough background information. The biggest complaint you will hear from law firms is how can we answer question X, if they didn’t tell us Y. That goes for not only pricing but also for practice coverage and overall scope of work. For example, If you are asking for a firm to bid on your IP work, and they have never done work for you in that area before you will need to open the curtain a bit if you want responses of any merit. Otherwise you will get marketing fluff that all will sound very similar.
4. Did we create a path of communication with the marketing contact?
   At some point of your RFP process you should be collecting the name of the marketing or responder contact. Having another contact beyond the lawyer will eliminate potential bottlenecks and allow for a much better flow of information between the issuer and responders during and after the RFP process. This connection beyond the relationship lawyer allows for that process to happen more effectively. The marketing team will be the most effective way for you to collect relevant information from the law firm – they know who to contact and what the firm does and doesn’t have available. Sometimes a 30 second phone call with the marketing contact clarifies a question that otherwise would have led to 12 pages of unnecessary information.
5. Did we ensure the responses won’t be overwhelming?
   A well-crafted RFP needs to find the balance of how to collect the right level of data to help you make a decision, but not so much that the RFP review and scoring process becomes overwhelming. It’s a great idea to use word counts and page limits – but you also need to be realistic. If you are asking a law firm to describe why they may be a better choice then their peer firms – it’s next to impossible to do that in fewer than 250 characters. If you have dozens of practice groups being included in the RFP, consider the fact there are many firms who will respond in all areas. You want to consider different strategies to find that middle ground of collecting content that helps you set the table for the decision making process while not being overwhelmed with 100 page responses.

Both law firms and legal operations departments will have better experiences and get better results when the RFP provides ample time, asks smart questions and allows law firms a platform to highlight their competitive advantages.

Matthew Prinn is a Principal with RFP Advisory Group, a consulting company that specializes in RFPs for the legal industry. For more tips on the RFP process, check out RFP Advisory Group’s recent webinar we hosted with the Association for Corporate Counsel: How to use an RFP as a tool to manage outside counsel.

We’ve met with more than 50 clients in the past 12 months and have enjoyed a front seat to the transformation happening across legal departments. Our meetings have reinforced that CLOC’s 12 core competencies are not stagnant and continue to evolve in their application and impact. Here is a taste of what we are seeing you all accomplish. You can use these to plan your next project, benchmark with your colleagues, and to continue to show the value that you bring to your legal departments and companies.

Financial Management: This has evolved into so much more than simply reporting on spend or managing to the budget. Legal departments are overlaying spend against key objectives of the company to ensure that the allocation of legal resources aligns with the strategic priorities of the company.

Vendor Management: We started with preferred vendors and negotiating favorable pricing. Legal departments are working with vendors to solve common challenges in technology, ediscovery, and more. They are also asking vendors for data dashboarding to spot trends and inform future action.

Cross-Functional Alignment: Legal operations roles are often filled with business professionals from within the company, including finance, products and IT. These hires bring with them relationships and institutional know-how, and allow companies to repurpose people, process, and technology used in the business for use in the legal department.

Technology & Process Support: Legal operations is changing the culture of legal departments by driving the adoption of technology and incorporating process-driven workflows into serving the business.

Service Delivery & Alternative Support Models: This is not just about insourcing versus outsourcing. It is about right sourcing the work to ensure that tasks are assigned to the right resource. This allows everyone on the team to focus on the high-impact and high-value work. Legal operations professionals are shining a light on churn and helping legal departments to stop doing tasks that don’t bring value.

Organizational Design, Support & Management: Legal operations departments are no longer behind the scenes. The groups are front and center within legal departments and the business. Legal operations professionals are increasingly leading pitch meetings, panel selection, fee negotiations, and outside counsel evaluations, and have more optics into organizational changes impacting their legal departments.

Communications: Together with their GCs, legal operations departments are helping accelerate change and are creating innovation fluency about the company’s business and legal industry. At legal department meetings, they are highlighting how technology is transforming their business, mapping legal goals to innovation objectives of the business, and are training on skills core to legal operations. At legal department retreats, they are changing the curriculum to include design thinking sessions, technology updates, and data metrics discussions. They are also bringing together outside counsel to share innovation success stories so that they may be replicated across all firms supporting the company.

Data Analytics: Using data, legal operations is changing the conversation about value. What is the business goal for the matter? How will success be measured? Are legal resources aligned to the business’s strategies? Legal operations departments are driving the creation of dashboards to spot trends, inform future action, and identify missed opportunities. They are also capturing knowledge about the performance and use of their outside counsel. This includes tracking who at what firms have done work in particular areas for the company, working toward a future where legal operations can provide predictive analytics on who is best suited to solve a specific problem for the business.

Litigation Support & IP Management: Legal departments are partnering with IT to bring even more of the ediscovery lifecycle in-house. Teams from information security, IT, internal investigations, and legal operations are working together to show how particular license offerings can reduce spend exponentially. They are using advanced features to identify risk before litigation and are reducing their digital footprint with their vendors by 50 to 90%.

Knowledge Management: In response to the needs of the business, especially during periods of rapid growth, legal operations departments are creating on-demand, self-service legal solutions for their internal customers. To do so, they scope what the business needs, how much of the need requires interaction with a lawyer, and what portion can be solved with automation and standardization. These solutions are driven by playbooks, AI and legal bots.

Information Governance & Records Management: Legal operations departments are creating programs that provide the business better access to information so that it can harness data for a strategic advantage and, in some cases, monetize that data. They are driving the creation of policy and procedure that is practical and enhances service to the business. They are also complying with emerging data privacy laws and protecting against data breach and the associated reputational damage.

Strategic Planning: Legal operations leaders are reporting directly to their general counsel and are helping set the strategy and goals for the legal department. They increasingly have a seat at the table and are measuring their achievement and performance against the established goals for the legal department.