by Anastasia Hufen, In-House Counsel, Landesbank Hessen-Thüringen Girozentrale Inhale. Exhale. Breathe in the April air, full of vernal confidence and the tempting thrill of spring. Well, back at my desk after a long sunny weekend, I could not help but ask: How can I keep the thrill by challenging my daily workload?! Simple enough: […]
Legal Operations teams are generally tasked with the design, planning and implementation of their legal team’s strategic initiatives to support the business. They must be able to balance managing risk and regulatory changes with operational efficiencies whilst keeping costs in check. Access to data in a structured form allows the team to provide valuable and […]
Getting your law firms on-boarded as efficiently and painlessly as possible is a key factor in the overall success of a legal eBilling project. How can you, as a legal department, add value to the process, and start a collaborative eBilling relationship?
Legal spend management technology generates savings for in-house teams in many ways. Using these savings areas, different eBilling software providers will estimate savings from $46,000 to $800,000 per year for a “typical” legal department. However, to truly know the financial impact, the cost of investment must also be considered and this is typically less publicised!
With the increased pressure on legal departments to improve efficiency and control costs, modern legal spend management solutions are a sensible option as they quickly generate savings that exceed the initial investment. A typical legal department can expect to save EUR 445000 in the first year. eBilling automates processes and allows legal departments to identify cost-saving measures both in the immediate term and by making use of data-driven strategies for the future. Here are six of the ways legal spend management can reduce your costs.
Part three. Change management is a very important component of successfully implementing new software in the legal department. It is often under stated or not fully appreciated. It is sometimes seen as an “add on” to the more technical aspects of the project. Those who underestimate the importance of change management during the course of the implementation often fail to achieve the desired business outcomes.
Part two. The importance of stakeholder engagement is vital, both during technology project definition and the implementation. So how can you identify key project stakeholders and get the buy-in required?
As you read in part one, the collection and analysis of stakeholder and end users’ requirements is a key enabler of success when designing and implementing a new system. It is of course (and unfortunately, frequently) possible to outline solution requirements without taking into account stakeholder needs but to do so presents a real but avoidable risk of project failure.
Some of these stakeholder groups or individuals may be fully on-board, giving it full support, and will require very little management in terms of expectations. However, there are likely to be key stakeholders who will have other priorities or may be resistant to the change that a new software tool brings.
In part one, we will answer the following questions:
Why use a is a scope document?
What should a scope document contain?
What steps should follow the creation of a scope document?
A lot of legal technology projects fail because the tool doesn’t meet the fundamental needs of the legal department. We recommend first documenting the requirements, then sourcing the right tool/s to meet these needs.
The benefits of eBilling for corporate legal departments are well documented. With digitally created billing files and automated processing and checking of invoices, eBilling saves a huge amount of administrative resource and tracks external legal spend in almost real time, ensuring adherence to guidelines and budgets. Less talked about is how the legal procurement function […]
We created BusyLamp to remedy the challenges of working with outside counsel. In-house counsel has historically had difficulties with the rising costs of legal services, matter management, and communications with outside counsel when it comes to legal billing. By eliminating these obstacles and helping reduce the costs of legal services, as well as the friction between in-house counsel and outside counsel, we hope to fulfill a pressing need.
Even many otherwise highly sophisticated CFOs and financial departments have a hard time estimating expenses and doing the fundamental accounting and bookkeeping they need to control costs and keep outside counsel appropriately reined in.
Hiring outside counsel to handle urgent, time-sensitive work (or even ongoing, non-sensitive projects) can be heartburn inducing, particularly if you’re tasked with keeping your team’s financials in line and reducing costs. Here are five battle-tested tips for making sure that the money that you do spend on outside counsel is spent wisely and that you get an appropriate return on any investment.
Whether you task outside counsel with predictable ongoing requirements, or you and your team send work out on an ad hoc basis, you need metrics to track performance as well as processes to keep your budget in line and deliverables appropriate.
The process of formal performance reviews isn’t always the most eagerly anticipated part of the work year for most managers and employees. So why should it be looked upon more positively by outside counsel and, say, corporate general counsel or other managers within an in-house legal department?
As much as they may not want to admit it, some general counsel find themselves in a position at times where monitoring and controlling outside counsel activity begins to resemble the proverbial difficult task of herding cats.
Cutting costs is a never-ending quest and topic of discussion for legal departments. Like accounting, HR, or marketing, it’s looked upon as a cost center and often at the head of line when cutbacks are targeted.
With an eye toward budget predictability and managing risk, more and more legal departments are looking for opportunities to implement alternative fee arrangements (AFAs) with outside counsel as an element of legal spend management.
Ask any general counsel what keeps them up at night regarding outside counsel management, what gets them frustrated, or what even makes them want to fire a firm, you’re likely to get some variation on this: unmet expectations.
Law firms and legal departments may not typically have a reputation for being early adopters of technological advances. But to play in the game in 2017, it’s important by now to be taking advantage of the time-saving, performance-enhancing software that’s readily available.
“Surprise!” is not something you usually want to hear from someone who is reporting to you on outside counsel billing or the entire spend of your legal department.
