Enterprise legal management (ELM) has come a long way since its introduction years ago. Before ELM, paper ruled almost every aspect of legal operations – from matter intake to bill submissions. As a result, the processes that powered critical legal operations workflows often lacked visibility and efficiency.
Now, with the cloud and other advances in technology, ELM solutions give corporate legal departments the ability to drive meaningful business improvements and cost savings.
How can you improve and drive even more ROI from enterprise legal management?
Concentrate on creating better workflows.
The very best ELM solutions represent a new paradigm changing the legal operations landscape. They drastically improve the delivery of legal services, allowing the exploration and definition of critical legal business processes.
By streamlining and automating essential workflows, an ELM solution also offers a true system of engagement. Users can immediately see the benefits, encouraging them to adopt it in higher numbers. With these supercharged workflows, the efficiencies will multiply from there.
With this in mind, here are five features critical to workflows that will take your ELM results to the next level.
- Workflow capabilities that match business requirements and are simple to change, alter or adjust. Different work types, such as matters related to employment, litigation, or mergers, have unique workflows that an ELM solution should accommodate.
- Comprehensive visibility into invoices at every stage, including submission, review and approval
- A single, secure platform for collaboration that captures notes, documents, attachments and email communications
- Reporting and dashboard views that make it easy to analyze invoices, evaluate performance against budget and see trends across your matter portfolio
- The ability to be highly configurable for a legal department’s needs, offering seamless integrations with important systems such as accounts payable, document management, IP management and other back-end systems
If you’re interested in hearing how corporate legal departments have supercharged their legal operations, consider joining the Onit Lean into LegalOps program for the U.S. or Europe. The online learning initiative offers educational presentations and virtual discussions from innovators and industry thought leaders.
Two examples of Lean into LegalOps events include:
- A virtual discussion with BT and Buying Legal Council on optimizing resources inside and outside the legal department featuring David Griffin, Head of Legal & Governance Systems and Change, BT
- An on-demand webinar titled “Quantifying Value in the Legal Department & Why the Stakes are High,” featuring Kevin Clem, Chief Commercial Officer of HBR Consulting and Matt Burdman, GLO Finance Manager of Colgate-Palmolive Company
