Author: Onit

Legal Operations Growth: How is Data at the Core of Financial Services and Insurance Legal Departments?

Posted on June 26, 2020 by - Legal Operations

This afternoon, Bodhala participated in Consero’s virtual conference – Legal Operations for Financial Services and Insurance: What’s Next for Legal Ops?

Bodhala CEO, Raj Goyle, led legal operations leaders from financial services and insurance companies through conversations on how our clients have leveraged our platform’s data throughout the COVID crisis, where gaps may lie in their current analytics tools, and how peer departments across industries are utilizing data to drive decisions and change.

Here are some of the key takeaways from the sessions:

Data drives action.

  • As echoed throughout the conference, legal operations professionals depend on data to drive conversation and action within their legal departments. Several attendees noted issues with the “dirty data” other systems produce. One attendee, a Director of Legal, noted that a lack of clean data has left his legal department unaware of what actions to take when it comes to spend and outside counsel relationships. As a result, his team approves all rate cards submitted by law firms without even giving it a second thought. Without context behind data and true apples-to-apples comparisons, in-house legal departments are left to play guessing games when it comes to outside counsel rates.

Let lawyers focus on lawyering.

  • The COVID crisis has led companies to evaluate every single line item in their budget with heightened scrutiny. As corporate legal departments look to contain costs, many attendees noted that managing relationships with outside counsel is critical. Throughout the conversation, attendees cited the various “key players” they bring in to handle the financial relationships with their outside counsel, including general counsels, legal operations, and procurement. This has allowed their in-house attorneys to focus on mission-critical work rather than handling law firm negotiations. Attendees have turned to data to evaluate their law firm relationships to determine the value these firms are providing for the rates that are being paid. One Legal Operations Manager shared that she has started to pry her in-house team with the following question, “If a firm cannot adhere to the outside counsel guidelines, are you prepared to break the relationship?” Another attendee, a COO, added that he recently downsized his company’s number of law firms from 300 to 30 over 18 months to optimize spend.

Sophisticated technology delivers real results.

  • As the maturity of each legal department varies, so does the sophistication of the technology they use. Other tools, such as e-billers and Tableau, can only go so far when delivering data and analyses. A Managing Director and Deputy COO shared that e-billers are limited by a lack of financial acumen which makes rate management a difficult task. Another attendee, a Head of Global Operations, noted that e-billers are only as good as the data you put into them, adding that they are “flat-files” that do not operate on sophisticated algorithms, as Bodhala does.

Bodhala’s Insights

Bodhala is reimagining the legal services market place by providing legal market intelligence, insights, and guidance to corporations to optimize their legal operations. 

From top timekeepers to average hourly rates, and everything in between, all you need to know about your outside counsel spend and law firm staffing is housed in your data. 

We arm you with the data needed to hire the right lawyer at the right law firm at the right price.

Here’s how our client’s legal operations teams have leveraged our Bodhala’s data and guidance recently:

Client A

Challenge: An insurance carrier was utilizing thousands of firms, but didn’t have a sustainable way to provide meaningful feedback on firm cost and quality on a regular cadence.

Action Taken: Bodhala instructed their corporate legal department to use Bodhala scorecards to score their most used firms, creating true apples-to-apples comparisons that could be shared with the law firms.

Client B

Challenge: A financial institution’s law firm rates were consistently increasing above inflation. The company’s legal team did not have the capacity to negotiate rates while collaborating on mission-critical work.

Action Taken: Initiated the handoff of rate card negotiations to finance and procurement, joining a number of leading companies that allow their legal departments to focus on being lawyers.

Hercules, “the god of analytics” is Bodhala’s trailblazing proprietary database that operates as a single source of truth for legal data, and provides our clients with a 360° view of the legal market.

Running on Hercules, the Bodhala platform has an intuitive dashboard that analyzes:

  • Rates
  • Observed discount percentages at relationship and practice area/work type level (anonymized)
  • Matter types
  • Factors that create peer sets, providing accurate apples-to-apples comparisons of cost and staffing

Our platform’s insights have enabled clients to initiate data-driven conversations both internally and externally. With Bodhala, corporate legal departments have the power to justify their objections, negotiations, and decisions as they relate to legal spend and law firm selection.

Bodhala’s Resources

We’re here to help you find efficiencies in your company’s legal spend – speak with a Bodhala legal expert about legal spend management tactics. Our team will provide advice on how to communicate with law firms, how to renegotiate, and what to look for in your law firms. Sign up for your complimentary consultation.

Spend Reduction in COVID: How Contract Lifecycle Management and Enterprise Legal Management Solutions Contain Costs

Posted on June 25, 2020 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management, Enterprise Legal Management

 In the first blog post of this three-part series on process efficiency and collaboration during COVID-19, we addressed the types of tools and tactics that legal departments are considering when building their solutions. In the second blog post, we explored how automation supports remote working and efficiencies. In this final blog post of the series, we focus on ROIs for tools such as enterprise legal management and contract lifecycle management.   

Cost containment is urgently becoming a top priority for many companies during these challenging times. The technology that enables it will transform the ever-evolving business landscape and provide a lasting impact. General counsel, in-house counsel and other corporate legal professionals have a viable path to support their companies through the strategic adoption of technology.

An essential component of containing costs is addressing efficiency. An IDC survey found that businesses can lose 20-30 percent of revenue each year based on inefficiencies such as redundant processes, outdated or siloed technologies and bottlenecks. Addressing that deficiency alone will streamline operations for a corporate legal department and curb expenses.

The legal department can contribute to containing costs for their corporations through the adoption of technologies that offer automation and process efficiency.

Operational Efficiencies with Enterprise Legal Management (ELM)

ELM solutions provide valuable automation to corporate legal departments looking to examine their spend. A McKinsey research report cited that business automation can save up to 60% of occupations almost one-third of their time – allowing employees to focus on more impactful contributions in support of their company.

ELM solutions offer wide-spread control of all the facets of a legal function through process streamlining and accessible metrics. They’re exceptionally agile and cover a wide range of tasks that often fall under corporate counsel’s purview including contract management, NDA creation and distribution, legal holds and legal service requests. In terms of hard cost reduction, ELM solutions have multi-year savings potential meaning your legal team can perpetually maintain lower spend.

ELM savings: The International Association for Contract & Commercial Management (IACCM) estimates that ELM can deliver 5-12% in savings each year. Onit customers have said they save between 10-50% on legal spend alone.

Agreement Automation with Contract Lifecycle Management  

Contract review and assembly can chip away at your day – primarily if it relies on ineffective technologies or processes. CLM solutions provide the basis for standardized processes that allow legal departments to capture and analyze related data, as well as a centralized location for all documents and files. They offer an intuitive dashboard that allows counsel to easily create or review contracts and mitigate risks by having fewer contractual exceptions.

CLM savings: Onit clients report that CLM solutions have helped their legal departments reduce their time spent in the contracting process by nearly 20%. Likewise, IACCM reports that CLM systems can save more than 9% annually.

Data-Driven Departments Set Themselves Up for Success

Lawyers everywhere know spend is tricky regardless of how the economy is doing. However, more than ever, legal departments must drive efficiencies with their spend data.  For corporate counsel and legal ops professionals trying their best to exert more control over their departmental spend, we think you’ll find our whitepaper titled Driving Savings, Process Efficiency and Collaboration in the Legal Department in a Post-COVID-19 Environment quite helpful.

Determine your Potential Savings

 Ready to explore your ELM and CLM ROI potential? Onit offers a suite of savings calculators built to help justify technology spend amid the recent market uncertainty from the global crisis. They use a combination of metrics and industry data to give insight into what these solutions can do for your business, including quantifying potential benefits and analyzing long-term effects of potential investments.

You can request a savings analysis here.

How to Automate ReviewAI for Increased Legal Team Efficiency

Posted on June 24, 2020 by - Artificial Intelligence, Contract Lifecycle Management

It’s no secret that legal teams are notoriously slow in adopting new technologies like contract automation. The work is far from digitalized — most lawyers print, read and annotate hard copies of legal documents (hence the origins of the phrase “redlining contracts”) — and make their final edits within Microsoft Word as the only electronic step in the process.

Without effective contract management tools, the contract review process remains slow, requires enormous attention to detail and is prone to costly errors.

Consider the case of a junior professional reviewing a contract that requires more than a few changes.

While reviewing modifications that seem reasonable, but do not fit the corporate standards, the contract professional needs to send the revised agreement to a more senior lawyer for legal review and approval. While this is happening, the line of business manager is emailing the contract team, asking for a status update. Countless emails are sent back and forth while multiple business days are lost.

This bottleneck directly impacts a company’s ability to reach favorable contract outcomes, and ultimately impacts the bottom line.

Many new positions within legal departments are created to handle contracts and legal compliance, yet most legal departments still confront a persistent headcount shortage. Instead of continuing to hire more and more lawyers, legal departments need a new AI solution that delivers significant productivity gains, allowing lawyers to utilize their skills, experience and talent on higher-value business objectives.

Enter a Word Add-in and legal document automation software that allows lawyers to dramatically streamline many activities typical of legal work, such as redlining contracts, comparing clauses to corporate standards, and ensuring that fine details comply with corporate policy.

In a comprehensive study, Onit examined the impact of its legal AI assistant, ReviewAI, on the productivity of in-house lawyers during routine contract review and compliance activities.

The study required lawyers to review contracts across three contract types – supply, service and confidentiality – and perform five tasks – summary, analysis, comparison, repapering and drafting. Together, these tasks reflect the day-to-day activities of compliance checking, standard reviews and contract drafting, all of which are typical of the contract management role.

For each contract, participants had to validate 285 items against corporate standards as accurately and quickly as possible. The participants performed the exercise manually for half of the study, referring to the company clause bank precedents as needed. For the other half of the study, participants were required to install, learn and use ReviewAI to enable contract automation.

The impact of legal AI on the contract management lifecycle included:

  • Lawyers who were new users were 51.5% more productive when using ReviewAI than when working manually, and that productivity increased the more proficient they became with the contract management tool.
  • It took 34% less time for lawyers to perform their day-to-day work. That translates to a team of 19 lawyers being able to do the work of 28, reducing cost to process each contract from $592 to $395.50 on average.
  • The manager of the contracts team, a senior lawyer with significant legal and business experience, was able to reallocate 15% of his time to higher-value activities.

For a typical legal department, utilizing ReviewAI enables lower costs, increased knowledge retention and improved contract quality, delivering an estimated 45x multiple on the cost of the ReviewAI investment.

To see ReviewAI in action and learn more about the return on investment it can bring to your legal team, book a demo and we’ll show you the ropes.

You can also read the full-length whitepaper for more info on our study.

BT Implements Onit Workflow Platform Apptitude

Posted on June 23, 2020 by - Business Process Management, Company News and Events

We’re excited to announce that BT plc has gone live with Onit matter management. The rollout represents the first in a series of planned implementations that include Onit legal spend management and legal service request, all built on the company’s business process automation platform Apptitude.

Using Apptitude, BT’s legal department will link all its best-of-breed applications such as document and vendor management, enabling comprehensive reporting and visibility across the department. The platform will enable BT to define, build and deploy new custom solutions to automate processes related to legal operations and compliance and better collaborate with business users outside of legal.

As a bonus, BT will share its vision for creating the ultimate lean legal department in a virtual discussion on June 25, 2020, at 9 a.m. ET/2 p.m. BST. In the webinar, European managing director Robert Johnson will discuss with David Griffin from BT and Silvia Hodges-Silverstein of Buying Legal Council how to use automated legal service requests and reporting tools to optimize resources inside and outside the legal department. Members of corporate legal departments are welcome to register here.

Read the press release.

Register for the webinar.

Learn more about Onit Apptitude.

 

This Private Equity Firm is Reevaluating Their Legal Spend – Are You?

Posted on June 23, 2020 by - Legal Operations

Since the start of the COVID crisis, we have posed the following question to our clients – How is your law firm sharing in your economic pain?

Looks like we were right in doing so.

According to a recent Financial Times article, private equity firm, KKR, asked its law firms, which include the likes of Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, to “share in their economic pain” by providing discounts of at least 15% on work completed this year.

This, coming from one of the most prominent consumers of complex law firm work, shows that law firms can no longer avoid the negative economic effects of a crisis.

This has set the trend for other private equity firms to follow.

Despite initially calling the request “galling” and “outrageous,” most advisers have accepted KKR’s request.

Many Bodhala clients have made similar requests to their law firms. This goes to show that even long-term law firm relationships are at risk if these firms are unwilling to participate in ceding some profits on rates – especially when those rates have increased at above-inflation for decades, as shown through our contribution to this WSJ article.

As “The Great Retrade” has taken shape across industries, this news did not come as a surprise to Bodhala.

From the real estate industry to airlines, insurance, and hospitals – companies have carefully reevaluated and retraded every line item in their budgets in an effort to stay afloat amidst the chaos.

Historically, law firms have sheltered themselves from the negative effects of past crises. From the dot-com collapse to the 9/11 terrorist attacks to the 2009 Financial Crisis, law firms emerged unscathed from the crushing impacts these events had on our economy.

Bodhala predicted that things would be different this time around.

And so far, we have been correct.

Even the most prominent private equity firms, regardless of their balance sheets, are experiencing cost pressures due to the economic slow-down, and they are demanding that their business partners share in the burden.

KKR’s request to law firms came from CFO, Robert Lewin, as the private equity firm has spent roughly $18 billion on deals since February 2019.

After reporting a net loss of $4.2 billion in their first quarter of 2020, KKR was left with few options but to direct their cash conservation efforts towards their law firms.

And they’re not alone in doing so.

As corporate legal departments try to optimize their spend, law firms are receiving more and more “IOUs” from their clients.

Heading into the second quarter of the year, law firms projected an 8% lengthening in collections as their clients carefully monitored their accounts payable.

Since the start of the economic downturn, Bodhala has fielded client requests for data-backed insights on how to handle their law firm payables during COVID.

It appears the following advice we have offered our clients is reverberating across corporate legal departments:

  • Renegotiate fees and freeze your rate cards
  • Examine law firm invoices with heightened scrutiny
  • Run matter RFPs to explore high-quality alternative firms at lower rates
  • Hold off on paying your legal bills
  • Ask for higher broken deal discounts
  • Freeze staffing on litigation
  • Evaluate your law firm’s economic health

KKR’s request is resetting the market, leading us to ask:

If one of the largest private equity firms in the world is safe-guarding their legal spend, shouldn’t you be doing the same?

Bodhala’s groundbreaking legal technology platform provides the data needed to optimize your spend on outside counsel.

Across industries, our clients have leveraged our platform’s insights to drive real, actionable change within their legal departments.

To help you with these issues we have created this free form letter for you to download to start the conversation with your law firms.

Subscribe to our blog to stay up-to-date on our follow-up content, including advice on how to handle law firm objections.

Webinar Alert: Maximizing the Value of Preferred Law Firm Panels with Corteva

Posted on June 18, 2020 by - Business Process Management, Company News and Events

As a publicly-traded, global pure-play agriculture company, Corteva, Inc. provides farmers around the world with a diverse mix of seed, crop protection and digital solutions focused on maximizing productivity to enhance yield and profitability. It hit $13.8 billion in global net sales in 2019 and has more than 10 million customers across 140+ countries.

Its corporate legal department – which includes more than 250 Onit Enterprise Legal Management technology users – stretches across multiple continents with thousands of invoices and hundreds of matters arriving each month.

To drive even more value through sourcing decisions, Gregg McConnell, Legal Operations Leader at Corteva, leveraged his 25+ years of experience in finance, procurement and technology to build a global panel of law firms. Using technology provided by Onit and our partner PERSUIT to support the initiative, he helped the company significantly reduce average prices across vendors – by up to 60% in some cases – and increase outside counsel engagement.

In this new Onit on-demand webinar, Gregg details how he built a global panel of preferred law firms and how technology like ELM from Onit and an outside counsel engagement platform from PERSUIT ensures maximum sustained value.

Joined by Matt DenOuden of Onit and David Falstein of PERSUIT, the presentation covers:

  • Putting rigor behind how to allocate work to your panel firms
  • Creating the right programs for different types of work (for example, IP vs. litigation)
  • Automating enforcement of panel guidelines and fee agreements
  • Evaluating panel firm effectiveness and compliance
  • Reporting on the value obtained from preferred firms

View the webinar and access the presentation slides here.

Lean into LegalOps

The webinar is part of Onit Lean into LegalOps. The online learning initiative offers legal and business professionals educational resources fueled by innovators and industry thought leaders eager to share their knowledge and ideas. Other on-demand webinars available through the program include “Building and Executing a Legal Technology Roadmap” featuring Curtis Batterton, MBA, CCMP, Legal Operations & Global Technology Manager of McDonald’s Corporation and “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.

Helpful links 

COVID as a Catalyst: How In-House Counsel Have Employed Technology Tools for Cost Containment

Posted on June 16, 2020 by - Business Process Management, Enterprise Legal Management

In the last article in our series on process efficiency and collaboration during COVID-19, we addressed the need for legal departments to stay on track and prepare for increased demand. We also recognized the need for technological innovation and process improvements that could be bottlenecked by shoestring budgets and remote staffing models as remote working environments have truly flipped legal department organizational structures on their head. This installment covers more granular tactics legal departments have been using to prepare for the incoming demand while containing costs and driving efficiencies, which they can build upon when legal departments can return to more traditional staffing models.

Technology Adoption for Containing Costs

Onit and many other providers have been evangelizing technology point solutions as part of larger workflow models for years. Now, the crux of what we are saying is this could be a prime moment to reevaluate a part of your solution you may have tabled. While many industries have shifted toward automation for cost-cutting process efficiencies, legal has been a bit slow to adopt these tools past eDiscovery and cookie-cutter agreement assembly. There has been quite a bit of literature published over the last five years or so that shows that technologies behind many of the most effective legal technology offerings are highly flexible and highly scalable, allowing for legal departments to find point solutions for almost any task they are trying to automate.

Plainly, legal organizations are very wary when it comes to what they think is replacing people’s jobs with machinery. It’s not a glamorous solution, and thought leadership is an important part of legal professional culture. However, the outcomes of adding automated tools to legal workflows include greater accuracy and efficiency and ultimately improves organizational cost cutting by not insignificant amounts. Legal departments can drive efficiencies dramatically by retooling and standardizing processes, which lead to time savings and serves as the highest impact and value improvements. In-house counsel should be specifically considering technology tools that improve accessibility, add remote work capabilities, collect higher quality data for analytics, and offer spend tracking in order to assess the efficacy of their process improvements and enhance lawyers’ abilities to tackle their workflows.

Work from Home as a Method for Improving Organizational Structures

It’s no secret that legal organizations, while not being particularly hierarchical internally, have rigorous performance standards. Like a microchip, legal organizations function most efficiently when all of their components are placed close to each other, but no one can confirm how long work from home will last and no company that wants to keep its employees safe should be hastily forcing employees to return to offices.

Work from home virtual office spaces allow for organizations to employ the best personnel they can find and with the correct tools to help legal functions achieve much greater process accuracy and analytics. Many of the tools legal service providers showcase allow users to organize their workflows to be more effective no matter where they’re located. Some of these tools, like Zoom, Slack and the average collaborative DMS/Document repository have been employed by companies for years and are more important than ever. At Onit, we are quite proud of our enterprise legal management and contract lifecycle management tools, which enhance legal departments in key collaborative and contract managerial areas. Ultimately, a proper balance of thoughtful process improvement, cost saving procedures and automated tools can help departments everywhere not only adapt to the economic effects of COVID-19 but also drive efficiencies perpetually.

For corporate counsel and legal ops professionals dedicated to improving their departments and organizations with innovative solutions and capable technology, read our whitepaper titled Driving Savings, Process Efficiency and Collaboration in the Legal Department in a Post-COVID-19 Environment. Also, stay tuned for more blog posts similar to this one where we will explore the different options for rising strong from the global pandemic.

Webinar Recap: 7 Ways to Manage Cost Pressures in Your Legal Department

Posted on June 16, 2020 by - Legal Operations

As corporate legal departments deal with the effects of COVID and begin to address the potential long-term impact on their business, Bodhala’s team of legal experts presented a complimentary webinar to guide attendees through various cost optimization strategies.

Hosted by Ketan Jhaveri, Bodhala’s President, and Chris Bennett, VP of Strategy, the pair dove into the challenges our clients have faced throughout the crisis and how they leveraged data and Bodhala’s platform to pivot accordingly.

From real estate to airlines, insurance to hospitals, we have witnessed “The Great Retrade” take shape across industries as companies try to conserve cash.

Jhaveri and Bennett explained that, historically, law firms have sheltered themselves from the negative impacts of crises, continually charging inflated fees while other industries suffer immensely. 

So why does this matter to you?

“With the shift in supply and demand, you need to keep a watchful eye on the billing practices conducted by your panel firms,” noted Bennett. It is now more important than ever for general counsels and legal operations professionals to protect their business from financial oversight and poor panel firm management.

Jhaveri posed the following question to the audience, “How is this downturn impacting your law firms and your work being handled by those firms,” adding “If they’re hounding you for an unpaid invoice, it’s likely things need to change.”

Data is the key to driving this change.

At Bodhala, we’re providing legal departments with the data they need to not only optimize their spend, but to justify it. 

Jhaveri added, “Law is not always about getting the lowest price – you do pay for quality and accessibility – but it is also about allocation and ensuring you’re hiring the right lawyer at the right law firm at the right price.”

Our team identified seven keys areas where general counsels and legal operations professionals leverage data to manage cost pressures within their legal departments, including:

  1. Rate Cards
  2. Matter RFPs
  3. Litigation
  4. Broken M&A Deals
  5. Law Firm Health
  6. Invoice Payments
  7. Bill Review

Here are some interesting discussion points from the webinar:

1. Bodhala client’s success with benchmarking

Our benchmarking methodology is based upon clustering – using like comparisons that can be measured against one another. With benchmarking, we arm clients with the information needed to start a data-driven conversation with their law firm. This drives clients towards the value they see fit and allows them to negotiate better rates by benchmarking their law firm against those of similar caliber. Recently, a Bodhala client leveraged our benchmarking capabilities to drive down the cost of a premier partner that they had been utilizing for years.

2. Bodhala enhances LEDES files

The Legal Electronic Data Exchange Standard (LEDES) file was developed over two decades ago with the purpose of providing a standard data format for electronic invoices. While LEDES files serve their purpose of getting invoices paid, they provide no insights on spend or how to manage relationships with outside counsel. At Bodhala, we have created a data transformation team that ingests invoice data in the platform and transforms the data in a meaningful way that allows clients to make true apples-to-apples comparisons and provide actionable insights to their departments. 

3. Bodhala’s approach to UTBMS coding

Uniform Task-Based Management System (UTBMS) codes were created to standardize the categorization of legal work and expenses; however, they can be problematic. After evaluating UTBMS codes within insurance and finance clients, we have noticed that these codes have a multitude of gaps and overlaps. This led our team to create our own litigation AI model to apply the proper UTBMS codes to clients’ data. At best, UTBMS codes submitted by law firms are 60% accurate – our model performs with 99% accuracy.

4. Bodhala’s diversity functionalities

The law has historically been the least diverse, white-collar profession in the country. Five years ago, Bodhala launched a product allowing our clients to track which lawyers are handling their matters and their origination credit. Our clients are looking to drive actionable change in their law firm relationships.

To learn more about implementing these changes, you can check out our webinar recording here or download our most recent whitepapers, Legal Operations: Time to Shine and General Counsels: Taking the Lead.

Financial Times Ranks Onit as One of the Fastest-Growing Companies in the Americas

Posted on June 12, 2020 by - Company News and Events

Financial Times released its inaugural list of the 500 fastest-growing companies in the Americas, ranking Onit in the top-third based on its revenue growth rate. The rankings highlight businesses across the continent that successfully leverage innovation and creativity to navigate these uncertain times.

Onit earned #153 on the list, based on its revenue growth from 2015-2018. Financial Times partnered with research company Statista to gather and compile the list, analyzing the financial performance of tens of thousands of companies in the Americas as potential candidates.

The company is committed to continual innovation. During 2020, it has:

Onit announced significant milestones in 2019 that include a $200 million strategic investment from K1 Management, the acquisition of SimpleLegal, 100% customer retention, an 80% increase in new hires, and other rankings such as top 20% of the Inc. 5000 and listing in the top half of Deloitte’s 2019 North America Technology Fast 500.

Congratulations to all the Onit employees and leadership that helped make this happen!

Legal Operations & COVID-19: How Law Departments are Adjusting for the Future

Posted on June 12, 2020 by - Legal Operations

This week, Bodhala participated in Consero’s virtual conference – Legal Operations & COVID-19: How Law Departments are Adjusting for the Future.

Bodhala CEO, Raj Goyle led legal operations leaders from Fortune 500 companies through dynamic conversations on how to leverage data to make more informed decisions on spend management and pressing diversity initiatives during these challenging times.

Here are some of the key themes from the sessions:

Data is the key to driving real change.

  • From cost optimization to compliance to diversity and inclusion, legal operations professionals are looking to leverage data to drive actionable change within their legal departments. One attendee, a legal operations business analyst, noted that her company is relying heavily on data to understand the diversity of the law firms they utilize and the timekeepers staffing their matters. Numerous attendees shared that although data is the key to driving change, it is difficult to rely on data from e-billers as it is both messy and inaccurate. Check out our infographic, 7 Reasons Why You Need More Than an E-biller to Create a Winning Legal Department, to learn more.

The pressure to cut costs is on.

  • Attendees noted the increased pressure to cut costs, as their CFOs have started to examine legal bills with heightened scrutiny since the start of COVID. Outside counsel rate cards were identified as the “low hanging fruit” that can offer immediate savings. Most companies approved their 2020 rate cards ahead of the global pandemic outbreak in March, meaning that the majority of companies are being charged inflated rates that do not reflect the current economic climate. One attendee, a legal operations specialist, noted that she, in tandem with the company’s general counsel, would be evaluating the legal department’s spend line by line to identify cost efficiencies in response to pressure from the CFO. To learn more about how legal operations professionals are championing their roles in response to COVID, check out our most recent whitepaper.

There is a magnifying glass on diversity.

  • Given the current climate, diversity initiatives have accelerated as companies are carefully evaluating their efforts to promote a diverse and inclusive environment, both internally and externally. Legal departments are implementing various measures to hold themselves and their law firms accountable. But, the bottom line is that data needs to drive these changes. One attendee, a legal operations business analyst, shared that her team is relying on data to examine the diversity of timekeepers staffed to her company’s matters after noticing an extreme lack of gender and racial diversity within her panel firms. Read our blog post to understand how Bodhala is helping teams make data-driven decisions on diversity and inclusion.

Ways to Act on Diversity Now

Understanding the diversity of timekeepers staffing your matters and tracking origination credit is the quiet revolution that will lead to diversity in the legal profession. 

If there was ever a moment for legal operations professionals to take the bull by the horns, the time is now.

Ask your GC if this information is currently being tracked, and if it’s not, ask why.

Are you armed with the data you need to drive change within your organization?

Bodhala’s Insights

Bodhala is passionate about empowering legal operations professionals with actionable insights that can drive meaningful change within their organizations.

From top timekeepers to average hourly rates, and everything in between, all you need to know about your outside counsel spend and law firm staffing is housed in your data. 

Bodhala arms you with the data you need to hire the right lawyer at the right law firm at the right price.

Hercules, “the god of analytics” is Bodhala’s trailblazing proprietary database that operates as a single source of truth for legal data, and provides our clients with a 360° view of the legal market.

Running on Hercules, the Bodhala platform has an intuitive dashboard that analyzes:

  • Rates
  • Observed discount percentages at relationship and practice area/work type level (anonymized)
  • Matter types
  • Factors that create peer sets, providing accurate apples-to-apples comparisons of cost and staffing
  • Timekeeper diversity

With our platform, Bodhala clients have utilized data and metrics to review invoices with heightened scrutiny, implemented scorecards to create true side-by-side comparisons of law firm rates and performance, evaluated firms’ diversity based on data-backed insights, and more. 

Bodhala’s Resources

We’re here to help you find efficiencies in your company’s legal spend – connect with us to learn more about how we can help.