Category: Business Process Management

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.

1. 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.
2. Comprehensive visibility into invoices at every stage, including submission, review and approval
3. A single, secure platform for collaboration that captures notes, documents, attachments and email communications
4. Reporting and dashboard views that make it easy to analyze invoices, evaluate performance against budget and see trends across your matter portfolio
5. 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

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.

2020 has not been the most favorable year for legal products and services vendors, at least in terms of the fallout from COVID-19. While world economies have remained all but frozen in the wake of the most taxing public health crisis in recent memory, legal departments and legal professionals have still been hard at work solving large enterprise problems and with fewer resources than usual. While economists describe these circumstances as exceedingly rare, corporate counsel and legal ops professionals know that the innovations they employ during the global pandemic have a long-lasting effect on efficiency and process improvements. Even though these times are stressful, many companies have used the slower pace of business to revise their processes and any enterprise can do the same.

The Only Constant is Change

Many legal technology providers have actually seen increased demand from the global pandemic as many companies are scrambling to find alternative revenue sources and tie up any loose ends on agreements that could impact their cash flows. That said, despite the circumstances in which demand has swelled, much of our previous content included thoughts about scalable solutions and embracing all of your technology tools. This may include triage such as reconfiguring document repositories, shifting your subscriptions towards cloud-based offerings and away from on-premises solutions, and employing new collaboration platforms to make it easy for legal personnel to work from anywhere.

Additionally, legal professionals have been evangelizing automation and analytics offerings for years. These tools often come bundled with many functions and pack in a lot of capabilities that might be overwhelming, but these solutions have been proven to address concerns of accountability while extracting valuable trends from data that your organization has already been collecting. Onit itself even offers free Business Continuity Apps which are a series of Apps we’ve released to support remote workers and their families that are sheltering at home. All in, these tools help organizations make the most informed decisions that keep their work aligned with their customers’ needs.

Keeping Your Eye on the Ball

Throughout the coming months and years, reeling back from all the changes COVID-19 has caused will be a challenge, but coming back from it is far from impossible. If your organization wants to thrive in a post-COVID world, it should stay focused on the value they can extract from the resources already available and be open to and plan for oncoming change. Finally, remember that none of this was easy and we’re all in this together; nobody succeeds if we don’t give our esteemed colleagues the time and environment they need to succeed.

For corporate counsel and legal ops professionals committed to expanding their knowledge-base, dive into our whitepaper, “Driving Savings, Process Efficiency and Collaboration in the Legal Department in a Post-COVID-19 Environment” and stay tuned for more blog posts similar to this one where we will explore the different options for rising strongly from the global pandemic.