Six Benefits of the Top Enterprise Legal Management (ELM) Solutions

When shopping for an enterprise legal management (ELM) solution, you need to ensure that it can be built around the way your teams work. After all, you’re trying to streamline your operations and avoid the old standards of relying on email and spreadsheets to get the job done. In today’s fast-paced legal settings, lawyers need to be able to work faster, smarter and more efficiently, and the best way to do it is by automating law department processes.

Traditionally, ELM vendors have taken a databased-centric (system of record) approach in designing their solutions. However, and this cannot be over-emphasized, your competitive legal department needs a system of engagement – a system that supports the highly collaborative nature of your legal work. This in turn reinforces your business goals and ultimately, your bottom line.

So, what should you be looking for in your new ELM solution? We’ve chosen six key benefits that should be included in a cutting-edge system:

1. Cost savings – You can realize substantial cost savings of between 4 percent and 7 percent of your outside counsel spend.

2. Easier collaboration – Improved knowledge sharing and collaboration among internal and external team members allow you to be more responsive to clients and provides transparency to your operations.

3. Enhanced performance – Aggregate all transactions and develop metrics around cycle times, work distribution and others at the portfolio, business unit and individual level that allow you to quickly shift to find efficiencies.

4. Drive operational improvements easily – Unlike the development and implementation process for a large enterprise legal management system, which can take several months or years, our implementation process is faster so you can see ROI quicker than other ELM vendors promise.

5. Robust reporting – Track total spend by law firm and matter type and create reports in various formats (i.e. line graph, bar graph, pie chart).

6. Flexibility – As your intake process evolves so can the tool. Adding a new approver or creating business logic to route matters or business documents to the appropriate reviewer can be done quickly without involving IT.

There are many other benefits of the best ELM solutions, so look around and find the system that best suits your organization’s needs. It will be time well spent, and will better ensure successful adoption of your new ELM solution.