Tag: BusyLamp

Legal e-Billing is the process of automating the review and approval (or rejection) of invoices received by the corporate legal department. It also requires the law firm to submit invoices in LEDES format, to capture detailed information about the work billed. E-billing software allows legal departments to identify cost-saving measures in the immediate term and by using data-driven strategies for the future.

WHY LEGAL DEPARTMENTS NEED LEGAL E-BILLING

e-Billing produces an electric file specific to legal. It contains not only the invoice header, matter information, and bill totals but a detailed breakdown of timelines, timekeepers, and expenses coded against tasks, activities, and expenses. A legal-specific e-Billing solution is essential to capture this level of detail; standard accounts payable (AP) systems cannot capture this. With the increased pressure on legal departments to improve efficiency and control costs, e-Billing is a solution that quickly generates savings that pay for the investment, so it is a popular software purchase for legal operations managers. The benefits of e-Billing are directly related to reducing costs, so it’s easy to prove return on investment (ROI) quickly.

BENEFITS OF LEGAL E-BILLING

A typical legal team will receive thousands of invoices a year. Reviewing these invoices manually is time-consuming and prone to error. Different billing guidelines – what firms can and cannot invoice for – exist for different firms. Trying to remember and accurately apply these rules when manually reviewing invoices is a daunting task, and mistakes will slip through the net, resulting in overpayment.

Legal e-billing systems allow the corporate legal team to set up rules, and incoming invoices are automatically reviewed and approved, rejected, or flagged for further review. Savings from this area alone are usually a least 5% of legal spend in the first year. Other cost-reducing benefits include:

• Law firms can submit their work in progress for real-time cost tracking and transparency, which reduces invoice surprises and rejected invoices, and speeds up payment so the legal department can benefit from faster pay discounts.
• Automating invoice processing and review reduces human error and frees up the legal team to focus on more high-value work.
• Time is also saved because legal matter and spend reporting is automated rather than needing to be compiled from multiple online and offline sources.
• Spend data enables legal analytics for data-driven, strategic decision-making, including negotiations, panel reviews, and sourcing.
• Effective, fair, consistent legal service provider and law firm sourcing Improved collaboration with external counsel leads to more strategic relationships, better matter outcomes, and more value for money.

Request a demo of BusyLamp eBilling.Space today.

As the name suggests, legal document management involves storing and handling documents related to legal matters. Lawyers deal in vast numbers of documents and files every day, from contracts, licenses, and letters to emails, notices, and reports. For this reason, they need access to systems that not only help store documents but also track, manage and search them. In fact, document management should not be confused with document storage, which is merely the saving and ordering of documents within folders either stored locally or in a file server.

Document management is so much more. While there are numerous digital document management tools, document management practices for legal often differ significantly compared to standards in other industries. As a result, dedicated legal document management software emerged in the 1990s to support law firms and in-house legal teams. Since then, the legal document management market has matured dramatically, and the solutions have moved into the cloud and become collaborative.

ESSENTIAL FEATURES OF A LEGAL DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM (DMS)

There are now many legal document management tools that can help legal teams to manage all their documents and correspondence; it can sometimes take time to know where to start and what functionality to look for. Before we get to some more interesting features, let’s start with the basic functionality essential for an excellent legal document management system.

STORE, ORGANIZE, AND SEARCH

A legal DMS should enable legal teams to store, organize and search their legal documents. This involves being able to move and copy documents where needed. Users should be able to record metadata about each document (e.g., matter number, team, location, etc.), and that metadata should be searchable along with the file name and document contents.

VERSION CONTROL

A legal DMS should also have version control functionality – allowing different versions of the same document to be saved (and in some cases restored), with the ability to check out documents to prevent version conflict. Auditing is also critical; there should be a record of every interaction between a user and a document version to clarify who did what and when.

NATIVE COMPATIBILITY

Documents should be able to be opened in their native applications directly from the legal DMS. It’s also vital that documents (both a copy and a link to the underlying document) can be shared via the legal DMS. With so many documents exchanged over email, integration with MS Outlook and other email clients is essential so that documents can be sent via email and emails and their attachments can be saved to the system. For this reason, it’s also crucial that legal document management systems support the storage of both emails and their metadata.

NUMBERING

Finally, a numbering convention is necessary with many documents and versions handled. Look for systems that automatically number documents, including matter and version numbers.

IMPORTANT LEGAL DMS FUNCTIONALITY

As well as the core features, there is another key functionality you should look for in a legal document management system.

SECURITY AND COMPLIANCE

A legal professional must adhere to industry compliance and security standards. When choosing a legal DMS, ensure it has top-grade and industry-recognized security certifications (ISO, HIPAA, and SOC) and excellent infrastructure security, including firewalls, application-level filtering, antivirus scanning, and intrusion detection. Also, ensure that data is encrypted both in transit and at rest. Application security is also vital – for example, password expiry and IP restrictions for cloud-based solutions. Any legal DMS vendor should be backing up data to multiple secure locations to ensure data integrity, and robust disaster recovery procedures should be in place.

Look for products that are thoroughly and regularly audited by third-party security experts who provide penetration testing and more. If you opt for a cloud solution, ensure you know where your data will be stored and that the data centers have state-of-the-art physical security.

RECORDS MANAGEMENT

Records management involves managing the creation, use, management, and disposal of records, including certain documents. It’s a critical component of most organizations’ risk and compliance activities. Therefore, any legal document management system should be able to allocate unique identifiers to documents, prevent unauthorized changes to documents, lock documents to avoid modification, and create audit trails of the document lifecycle. The system should also support retention scheduling and rules for how long different documents should be kept. These rules should be assigned based on the type of document. Finally, the legal DMS should allow for the disposition of documents that no longer need to be retained.

PERMISSIONS MANAGEMENT

Look for systems that provide role-based permissioning to reduce the risk of unauthorized access to sensitive information. With this functionality, documents and folders can be restricted for access by certain users or groups only. However, sometimes more than this level of permissioning is needed when specific matters and associated data need to be completely hidden from all but a small group of people. Just because you can’t see a particular document doesn’t mean metadata (e.g., matter name) will also be hidden in other system areas, such as lookups, which could be a problem for highly sensitive matters. Look for legal DMS that lock down the whole matter by hiding the matter and its data and documents from appearing anywhere in the system for non-authorized users.

INTEGRATIONS

Documents, and contracts, in particular, are part of a broader lifecycle encompassing drafting, review, negotiation, execution, and management. While legal document management systems help with storage and versioning, many legal teams rely on other tools to support the different elements of the document lifecycle. For this reason, when looking at legal DMS, you should make sure it has the integrations you need right now and the future integrations you may need. At a minimum, ensure the system integrates well with Microsoft Office and Outlook.

Given we are now a remote workforce following the pandemic, look for tools that integrate with collaboration and instant messaging tools like MS Teams and Slack. You can also look at integrations with document assembly tools for drafting documents and eSignature tools for document execution. You may also favor legal DMS platforms that integrate with artificial intelligence (AI) tools so that you can intelligently sort, categorize and review your documents and extract meaningful data. AI integrations can significantly improve the search quality within your legal DMS.

Legal documents go hand-in-hand with legal matters and projects. There needs to be a very close alignment between a legal DMS and a matter management system. This enables matter data to be associated with documents and invoices in the legal DMS, and the matter management system pulls in relevant documents for a particular matter. For legal teams to operate efficiently, they need to consolidate and align their data across multiple systems. This also offers the best user experience, so users are not always “context switching” into different software tools. All your systems need to communicate so counsel can navigate easily across matters and their documents. Legal teams should be looking to start building their “legal operations space” – consisting of a legal document management system alongside matter management, eBilling, and contract management software.

DEPLOYMENT OPTIONS

When purchasing a legal DMS, you will likely have two primary deployment options: on-premise, which means the application and documents will be hosted and stored in your organization’s own IT infrastructure, and cloud, where they are hosted and stored on secure remote servers within one or more data centers. There is a third option – hybrid storage, where the application is cloud-hosted, but documents and data are stored on-premise.

Cloud has its benefits in terms of speed of deployment, scalability, and reduced cost of operation and maintenance; however, on-premise and hybrid solutions are suitable for organizations that want more control over their data and have higher security requirements. Organizations such as financial institutions need very high levels of security. While some cloud providers can meet these standards, some organizations will always insist on on-premise deployments. Make sure you know what your organization expects by deployment and document hosting and that the legal DMS will support this.

COLLABORATION AND PRODUCTIVITY

A good legal document management system will help you and your team get work done. Document collaboration is increasingly moving online with document co-authoring tools, including those with MS Office online. This offers a better drafting experience where colleagues can work in real-time to amend and refine documents. Legal DMS systems should offer collaboration tools and integrations to help users not only store and locate documents but also work on them. Look for legal DMS platforms that offer a range of collaboration functionality – from co-authoring and annotations to commenting and approvals. With a growing remote workforce, see if the legal DMS has tools supporting asynchronous working across remotely dispersed teams. Also, consider exploring AI tools to deliver intelligent search capability so users have better access to legal knowledge in context.

TRANSFORM CHAOS INTO ORDER WITH A LEGAL DMS

A legal DMS can transform the way your legal team works, collaborates, and accesses knowledge. It will bring order to the chaos of legal documents and will create a secure and searchable repository that gives your team quick and straightforward access to the documents they need when they need them. The right integrations and functionality will help manage entire document lifecycles and make your legal team more productive with collaboration tools.

Stop hunting down documents across email, local folders, and shared drives, and make the leap to a modern legal DMS. Hopefully, our tips for what to consider will set you and your team on course for an efficient and productive future where working with documents is a pleasure — and not a chore.

Request a demo of BusyLamp eBilling.Space today.

A Request for Proposal (RFP) is a query with which in-house legal departments can outsource their work to external law firms. Especially nowadays, when legal departments must do more for less, the RFP is becoming an increasingly important tool.

A typical use case is when a business unit needs legal advice and turns to their in-house lawyers for it – this could be a request for an answer to a simple query or, at the other extreme, the organization is contemplating a merger with another company or is facing some severe litigation. Ideally, the in-house team has an internal knowledge management or transaction information system containing a record of previous advice or work undertaken for the business. The legal team then needs to ask themselves, can the request be handled internally?

If the work carries high risk, needs significant resources, and has areas needing specialist expertise, involve the organization’s external legal advisors from the start. If this is the case, we need to begin selecting an external law firm to instruct. The in-house department will send a Request for Proposal (RFP) to decide on the law firm to undertake the work.

An RFP for legal services involves a client corporation requesting law firms or legal service providers to submit proposals to do work on behalf of the client’s internal legal team. This can range from a basic fee estimate to a full RFP for significant legal work. Clients create and share RFPs with their legal service providers; they can set vendor selection criteria, track responses, and monitor submission rounds before selecting the preferred firm and inviting that firm to begin the work. RFPs can also go to legal service providers, including those that provide law firm services and not just legal advice, for example, eDiscovery, document review, secondees, or other managed services.

WHICH INFORMATION IS TYPICALLY IN AN RFP?

If an RFP is going to one or more law firms that are new to the client and have not previously been asked to provide their background and work experience information or are not on a client’s panel of firms, then more information of the following nature will be required:

• A firm’s overview will require an introduction to the firm, office locations, lawyers, and jurisdictions.
• Information about diversity, legal industry awards, and other firm accomplishments is also essential.
• A description of experience by practice area, including supporting detail in terms of example cases to help to highlight the firm’s depth of expertise.
• References – ideally of the type applicable to the law firm proposal or RFP.
• IT capability, including data privacy and security policies, and good 24/7 communications demonstrate the law firm’s robust in-house technical ability.
• Law firms should demonstrate their capability to provide invoices consistent with any format specified in the client’s billing guidelines.

However, suppose we discount the RFP to establish the suitability of a new law firm to work for a client. In that case, we should look at the contents of the more “run of the mill” RFP when a client is looking for a proposal/quotation for a new matter but from a controlled list of panel firms, for example. While every law firm proposal differs, several central sections will appear in most RFPs.

Basic sections of an RFP include:

• Timeline: The RFP will have dates for the submission and, possibly, the work itself.
• Contact persons and responsibilities: The vital contacts of the client and responsible lawyers in the firm. The client can select the lawyers the RFP should go to and who should respond.
• Staffing plans: The client will expect the law firm to detail the staffing plans for the matter, including the time estimated for each timekeeper classification and the ratio between them.
• Rates and pricing: The client will require the law firm to quote the rates they will charge for each timekeeper classification, the total fee estimate and any expenses, what discounts might be available, and suggest any alternative pricing arrangements they could offer.
• Scope of work: The client will specify the content of the work, giving as much information as possible. A good RFP will have templates for different matter types to assist the law firm in defining how much work is required and the success criteria. This will also include which jurisdictions are covered by the RFP, and it may also allow the matter to be broken down by phase, to get a more granular estimate of the expected costs.
• Representative Cases: A law firm might need to provide a list of comparable matters it has completed (suitably anonymized) to reinforce its experience.

The time is ripe to get more out of your legal department with simple means. In our “What Legal Ops Teams Should Know About RFPs” blog, we examine the RFP process and explain how our legal spend management solution helps streamline it.

Request a demo to see our powerful legal spend management solution tool for yourself.

In today’s business world, achieving universal goals such as transparency, efficiency gains, and data analysis comes through the combination of skilled personnel and software. The discipline of legal operations is no exception; just glance at the world’s leading legal operations teams. They all rely on tailor-made legal operations tools in their daily work.

The scope of legal technology an organization deploys strongly correlates with the level of maturity of legal operations. Companies with more mature legal operations tend to utilize legal technology more extensively, resulting in greater success in achieving business goals. Utilizing technology can lead to the growth of legal operations departments and the establishment of more advanced goals and capabilities.

With business priorities for legal operations, there are four universal areas that are significant:

• Reducing external legal spend.
• Automating and streamlining manual processes.
• Improving legal work prioritization.
• Increasing the quality of legal advice.

Overarching these is the additional priority to evaluate and introduce legal technology. Although it may seem like a separate priority ranked alongside the others, it underpins all other legal operations priorities. As demonstrated by legal operations leaders using technology to enhance performance, the introduction of legal technology enables the achievement of other goals.

HOW LEGAL OPERATIONS LEADERS USE TECHNOLOGY TO ACHIEVE GOALS

Mature and advanced legal operations teams use technology. Smaller, less mature teams also need software tools to enhance their performance. Some of the benefits that technology delivers include:

• Legal e-Billing ensures law firms adhere to billing guidelines which save money.
• Workflows automate repetitive, manual processes, saving time and reducing manual errors, and freeing up lawyers to do more high-value work.
• Real-time dashboards on matter or contract statuses give visibility to stakeholders.
• Comparing law firm price and performance for more transparent and fair reviews and negotiations.
• Knowledge and document management tools make it easier to collaborate, search, and find information and documents.
• Consistent data creates reports and analytical capabilities to enable decision-making.

CHOOSING THE RIGHT LEGAL SOFTWARE FOR YOUR NEEDS

A common failing seen repeatedly is when legal operations teams get dazzled by features and buy technology they don’t need and won’t use. Not only is this a waste of investment, but it creates a skepticism that affects future projects. Some teams may need more than one highly customized solution with multiple integrations; others require a simple out-of-the-box tool to automate key processes.

Before you talk to any vendor, you need to know your challenges and goals and document your current process and workflows. Good vendors will not try to sell you all the bells and whistles that result in you buying an underused solution; we want your project to succeed just as much as you do.

Here are the recommended legal technology project steps:

1. Identify your key challenges, needs, and requirements.
2. Define the project team; include future users, stakeholders, and don’t forget members from other crucial teams.
3. Document your current people, processes, and technology for your challenges. Look at how you might change this and your priorities; what is ideal and the acceptable and unacceptable outcomes.
4. The vendor or consultant can help you refine this further down the line.
5. Research the market, possible solutions, vendors, and consultants. Consider “build-or-buy” options.
6. Only now should you approach vendors and consultants. If you do this any sooner, you will be overwhelmed with all the potential opportunities for improvement and lose focus on what is most important for your business right now.
7. Calculate the business case, including any ROI. (Download our guide to building a business case for legal spend management).
8. Consider and plan for the impact of change management, stakeholder management, and corporate culture.
9. Choose the right solution for your team!

DATA-DRIVEN DECISION MAKING

The introduction of legal technology will achieve “quick wins” in the cost and efficiency goals mentioned above. Where mature legal operations departments excel is in the integration of multiple legal technology tools. This creates centralized, consistent data that, in turn, enables advanced data analytics across numerous legal practice areas and work types.

Due to their data analysis capabilities, mature legal operations functions can address more challenging legal department problems and make data-driven, strategic decisions around department staffing, matter resourcing, risk management, negotiations, panel reviews, and more. From your first legal technology project, you have started to create data that will take your cost and efficiency savings to the next level and position legal as a strategic value-generator for the business.

In our Matter Management blog series, we have already addressed the fact that in-house counsel are under enormous pressure in today’s demanding business environment to serve their internal clients effectively and professionally while keeping costs low and minimizing potential risks. In this article, Carina Smolik-Fischer, director of product at BusyLamp (an Onit company), summarizes the top 9 benefits of a matter management cloud solution and how it can benefit your legal team.

In-house counsel are challenged to find innovative legal tech solutions for their legal departments that enable them to increase productivity and speed without sacrificing the quality and value of their work. At first, these may appear to be competing goals, but with the help of a matter management solution, you will make the first step towards reconciling these seemingly conflicting goals. With matter management, you have a centralized solution that allows you to create matters, centrally view files easily, and access related documents and emails.

Matter Management from Onit offers all the modules and features modern legal departments need for daily and efficient work. Legal market experts have developed Onit’s Matter Management solution with a strong understanding of the complex requirements of in-house counsel and the regional specifics of the DACH legal market.

And now to the good news: implementing such a matter management software does not have to be complicated. Using cloud software is the fastest way. Furthermore, cloud-based software programs offer you nine key advantages that can significantly benefit your business:

1. General Benefits

Any cloud-based application – including matter management – opens up new ways of collaboration, flexibility, innovation, and mobility. Users can access applications quickly and easily from anywhere via the internet, extend them as needed, and share their data with authorized third parties within seconds. New functions and innovations are immediately available in high quality, thus offering users more agility and flexibility. But that’s not all: cloud technology for matter management provides numerous benefits that would be difficult or impossible to achieve with local on-premise software.

2. Costs

With cloud software, there are no unique investment costs for purchasing and running hardware and operating system software. Also, there is no need for internal know-how about the software application besides the monthly license fee. With Onit, there are only one-time onboarding costs for the software’s individual configuration, including users, authorizations, master data, templates, and more. In addition, there is a short training session to get you started quickly and comprehensively. This allows you to calculate reliably, minimize financial risk and avoid surprises.

3. Direct Availability

Cloud software is always ready. No technical installation is required, so your IT deployment is limited to testing security-related issues. With Onit, for example, you are using software hosted in the EU that complies with the latest security standards, e.g., certifications such as ISO 27001 and ISO 9001.

4. State-of-the-Art Security Standards

There are often concerns that cloud technologies are unsafe and exposed to attacks. However, this is not the case. Our Matter Management solution runs on Microsoft Azure. Large providers like Microsoft are constantly investing in the security of their data centers, using the latest software, and having specialized employees.

5. Automated updates and upgrades

Cloud applications have automated upgrades and updates that keep your matter management solution up to date. This has the advantage of always providing you with innovative features and constantly guaranteeing the security of your software.

6. Collaboration

Cloud software is accessible via the internet – all you need is your normal browser like Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge. As an end user, you benefit from this, especially with matter management software. For example: once a digital file is created in our Matter Management solution, you can easily share or assign its content, such as documents, emails, appointments, tasks, etc., with authorized third parties (departments such as HR, procurement, or external law firms). Use the platform itself or MS Teams for this purpose – all required contents of the digital file are under your control 24/7. Legal services such as the internal Legal Service Request are also provided via the Internet browser and therefore do not require technical installation. Sharing on the intranet or using an MS Teams APP makes access easier and saves time. It gives you the flexibility to focus on your higher value-added work.

7. Apps and Plug-Ins

Easily extend your matter management software using APPs and plug-ins. These integrate directly into the application, extending your cloud software with just a few clicks. Matter Management offers integrations with MS Office, MS Outlook, and MS Teams so that you can communicate directly within the solution.

8. Data Security

We are very aware of the fact that your legal department manages extremely sensitive data. A loss of data could have serious consequences. As mentioned at the outset, established cloud providers such as Microsoft have significantly more capabilities to provide data in a highly available, stable, and secure manner. Furthermore, data communication between the local computer and the Internet service is always encrypted to prevent access by unauthorized persons and to protect your data using state-of-the-art technologies.

9. Scalability

Cloud software is flexible and dynamically scalable. Onboarding additional users, sites, or departments is possible anytime and immediately without any lead time or spare capacity in your IT department. This also applies to the use of more storage. Cloud-based software allows you to grow according to the unique needs of your legal department.

Summary

Cloud-based matter management provides legal departments with the tools and applications to make their processes more efficient, streamline their legal operations, and efficiently deliver value to their organization. Add value through smart technologies and improve the visibility of your contribution to the company’s success. Use Matter Management to optimize the spending of your costs. Use your valuable time to focus on high-quality legal advice and put aside the time-consuming management of your legal mandates.

Request a demo of BusyLamp eBilling.space.

Technology is increasingly vital in helping in-house legal teams optimize their time and resources. The transformation of working practices over recent years, with the continued trend for remote working, means IT tools are more important than ever for communication, administration, data management, and knowledge sharing at work. In addition, legal teams require specific legal tech software to manage and automate everything from spend management and billing to matter management, reporting, and administration.

In-house legal teams face an array of vendors to choose from. With so much choice, how should in-house legal teams choose the right technology vendor for their needs?

To help you, we’ve compiled a checklist of key considerations:

YOUR LEGAL TECH VENDOR CHECKLIST

1. DOES THE TECHNOLOGY MEET DATA SECURITY REQUIREMENTS?

The data handled by legal teams are too sensitive to take any risks. You need to be confident the technology you choose meets every security requirement of your IT department. Look for solutions that offer data security assurances, such as banking-grade encryption, single-jurisdiction hosting, and compliance with regulatory standards, such as ISO 27001 and GDPR.

2. DOES THE TECH VENDOR MEET COUNTRY-SPECIFIC REQUIREMENTS?

Define your requirements by thinking through your daily work and identifying what is missing. How can technology help? Ask vendors how their technology can address your specific challenges. For example, when your company is based in Europe, can the technology meet European country-specific requirements, such as taxation and invoicing?

3. WHAT LEVEL OF CUSTOMER SUPPORT IS ON OFFER?

Does the vendor have a professional customer service team? Will you be assigned a dedicated customer success manager? Does the vendor have dedicated European support capabilities? How many languages are supported? Do they have the resources to provide the support you need?

4. IS THE VENDOR TRUSTED BY CLIENTS AND INDEPENDENT COMMENTATORS?

Check out client testimonials, read case studies and ask to speak to clients. Find out if the vendor and its solutions are trusted and valued. Look for independent approvals or verifications from respected organizations, such as Hyperion Global Partners. Does the vendor have a network of trusted partners to support and champion its solutions?

5. DOES THE TECHNOLOGY INTEGRATE WITH EVERYDAY IT SYSTEMS?

We all use various software and IT systems to support efficient collaboration and communication. You need to find legal technology that integrates fully with common software from Microsoft, Google, and others. Choose interoperable legal technology tools that meet you where you work.

6. CAN YOU REQUEST A FREE DEMO?

Ask all shortlisted vendors for a demonstration of their software and its application to a practical example. Before committing to new software, take it for a test drive. Most vendors offer a free trial to test features, benefits, and usability.

MEET LOCALLY

If you need help choosing a vendor, you can meet many leading legal tech providers at conferences across the United States and Europe throughout the year. These provide an excellent opportunity to learn more about your region’s legal tech landscape, meet some of the people you could work with, ask questions, and sample the technology.

Request a demo of BusyLamp eBilling.Space today.

With the global expansion of remote working and increased reliance on digital technologies to support every type of business, it’s no surprise that data security has risen to the top of the boardroom agenda. The issues associated with data security are particularly prominent in the minds of legal counsel since in-house legal teams frequently must help organizations manage and recover from crises, including data breaches.

WHY DOES DATA SECURITY MATTER?

Most organizations today rely on data. That means any data loss, whether caused by cyber-attack or human error, poses a considerable risk to the business. The impacts include significant time, cost, and resources spent responding to and recovering from an incident and the potential loss of revenue and long-term reputational and financial damage.

REAL DATA SECURITY RISKS FOR EUROPEAN LEGAL DEPARTMENTS

Recent studies show that a significant number of European businesses suffered a data breach involving the loss or theft of more than 1,000 records in the past two years; many of them came from a remote workforce. The shift towards remote working in the wake of the pandemic has increased the risks to data – and no legal team or business can afford to ignore them.

Data Breach Preparedness Study sponsored by Experian and conducted by the Ponemon Institute found that 49% of European businesses had suffered a data breach involving the loss or theft of more than 1,000 records in the past two years. Almost half of the data breaches came from a remote workforce (43% of European respondents). The shift towards remote working in the wake of the pandemic has increased the risks to data – and no legal team or business can afford to ignore them.

In the legal profession, the highly confidential and sensitive nature of internal data (and with law firm suppliers) makes it especially important to protect. And in an industry where your reputation is one of your most valuable assets, any data security incident that undermines that reputation is potentially devastating.

The CLOC (Corporate Legal Operations Consortium) 2022 Survey by the Association of Corporate Counsel highlighted concerns about the risks to data among Chief Legal Officers. It reported that “57% of the respondents in an ACC survey noted the urgency of having a ‘comprehensive data management strategy to ensure compliance, defensibility and security.’”

HOW TO CHOOSE LEGAL SOLUTIONS THAT PROTECT YOUR DATA

Legal firms must ensure their IT security protocols are as robust and effective as possible to protect valuable data. The key is providing the software and systems you use to offer the highest levels of data safety. Even the most technology-savvy legal operations managers may need to be more expert in data security. But there are some key features you should look out for in any legal software you choose:

• Single jurisdiction hosting ensures that once you’ve chosen the geographical location for your datacenter, your data never leaves that country.
• Banking grade encryption: using the latest algorithms to encrypt data wherever it is stored, accessed, or transmitted – whether on disk, on the network, or in the database.
• Secure cloud hosting: choose applications hosted securely on your own data center (private cloud), certified data centers (public cloud), or a hybrid.
• Regular audits, pen tests, and certifications – compliance with recognized global certifications and standards, including ISO27001, ISO 9001, and GDPR, provides peace of mind in the security and reliability of your software.

Find further advice in our in-house legal tech data security checklist and here: Legal spend management software can help mitigate data breaches.

NOW IS THE TIME TO SECURE YOUR DATA

As the new financial year approaches, now is perfect for organizing your data security protocols. New vulnerabilities and data breaches hitting the headlines recently are a timely reminder of the risks posed to data and the need for constant vigilance. Throughout Europe, data protection plays a central role for legal departments and is a top priority for corporate governance. As you set your legal tech budgets for the year ahead, ensure data security is at the top of your shopping list.

DEVELOPED FOR SUPERIOR DATA SECURITY

The legal operations software provided by Onit’s European legal spend management solution BusyLamp eBilling.Space has enterprise data security terms front of mind. That means our solutions handle the matter, and billing data are subject to the highest security standards.

Moreover, BusyLamp has been recognized again by Hyperion Research as an Enterprise Legal Management Advanced Solution in its MarketView™ Report. The report recognized our data privacy policies, highlighting our robust data privacy features, including geographic data segregation options and automated data classification and retention tools.

YOUR DATA IN SAFE HANDS

When it comes to e-billing software that helps you reduce costs and operate more efficiently, you can be confident that BusyLamp offers market-leading data protection and security standards to safeguard the confidentiality of your matters and the reputation of your business.

Request a demo to find out how BusyLamp can safely, securely, and compliantly enhance your legal operations.

Several years ago, the global Corona pandemic emerged. We all experienced different waves, had to be flexible, and changed our way of working as we knew it previously. We want to sum up: what have law firms and their clients learned from COVID–19 and what changes to their systems, working practices and organizational structure have they made and are retaining post–pandemic?

Rather than dwelling on the immediate past, we will focus on the positive outcomes for the future. We can also say that at this stage of the pandemic, much is still relevant – it is not over yet – with new variants and the possible results of easing the lockdown and the lack of 100% vaccine coverage – the legal profession will need to continuously deal with challenges and retain a positive perspective. Nobody planned for Covid-19 and knows what is coming next, but there will be something! If Covid-19 is like other “catastrophic” events, such as flood, fire, or other external event, many law firms and their clients had business continuity and resilience plans in place, some parts of which allowed them to respond quickly and positively. Others, however, did not and had to face major problems.

WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED?

So, what have law firms and clients learned, what came out of Covid-19, and what will the longer-term “business as usual” look like? We have spoken to many Legal Operations Managers and GC in corporate legal departments. We also have an excellent ongoing dialogue with many law firms. We have gained insight into what they did in the immediate lockdown scenario and what they do in the (hopefully) post-pandemic world.

1. Remote Working: As we know, clients and their law firms had to immediately go into lockdown near the start of the pandemic and institute remote working for almost all their staff. One client organization had to set up remote working for 75,000 people and did it successfully. Many organizations, not just in the legal world, are rethinking their longer-term office requirements and whether their current capacity should apply to the future. No one is saying that the traditional office will disappear. Still, all our contacts believe there will be a significant re-evaluation of the accepted norm to provide a desk for every individual.
2. Greater need for technology: Lockdown also required a swift move to technology that supported home/remote working – at a scale never envisaged. Some law firms and in-house departments had already implemented a degree of technology and support for people to work from home (WFH), but the pandemic meant that this had to be done very quickly with almost no notice. Immediately, Zoom, Teams, Skype, or whatever became required for any meeting and for work colleagues to maintain visual contact with their peers. Tools to enable collaboration and communication have become vital, leading to a massive take-up of document-sharing applications, electronic document signing, and instant messaging systems. Additionally, those responsible for IT must ensure that data and access security are not compromised! Other applications within legal departments manage work, including workflow and case management, complete contracts access and administration, eDiscovery, IP systems/brand protection, e-billing/spend management, law firm instructing (including RFPs), and matter progress tracking.
3. Flexible business priorities: For clients, there was an immediate re-evaluation of their business priorities, and what seemed like a sensible plan at the beginning of 2020 was suddenly thrown into confusion. For example, one client realized that their customer call centers could not continue as they were and had to be home-based with all the supporting technology that went with that. Some organizations, such as airlines, faced an immediate financial crisis as thousands of flights got canceled, and the business went into survival mode. All clients have said that as a priority, they dropped all non-core tasks/processes and focused on what the business needed to survive.
4. Agile workflows with internal clients: Certainly, one lesson learned from the pandemic has left many corporate legal departments realizing that they must be more agile in how they approach working for their internal “clients.” One GC has said that the in-house lawyer must be more self-critical and demonstrate how they add value to the business. This will involve being more flexible, preparing to adopt new roles as required, and showing how the legal team can influence the rest of the organization. Another GC said that the in-house team must focus on taking a more “risk management” approach and that mitigating risk for the business will be even more critical. Also, communicating back to the business on what they are doing is vital, as it shows how their work has a positive ROI (return on investment).
5. Higher value requirement from law firms: There is an expectation from several clients we have spoken to that they want their external law firms to be more proactive and expressed disappointment that they were not anticipating their client’s needs. One client said that just sending a newsletter in response to the pandemic was not enough, and he expected more engagement from his outside law firms. Some clients were looking for much more from their firms – not only legal advice but clear added value, a more cost-driven approach, and to come up with ideas to challenge the status quo. They also expect any relationship meeting to be more meaningful, with better cost tracking and post-matter reviews being essential. At panel review time, these clients will seek a positive response from prospective external law firms.
6. Greater need for knowledge exchange: Some law firms have already implemented knowledge management systems, but now all organizations realize that there must be more formal ways for sharing information within the law firm and potentially with the clients. Certainly, within law firms, the introduction of a high degree of remote working means there is little or no opportunity for easily sharing information or even asking the quick question that a chat around the water cooler or walking down the corridor to speak to a colleague can achieve – i.e., informal knowledge sharing. Now, this knowledge sharing must be more formal – calling for the development of knowledge management or “legal know-how” systems – and this means not just using the firm’s document management system but building data stores of indexed information that is easy to find and reflects the law firm’s collective experience.
7. New management methods for legal staff: More than one in-house counsel believes there will have to be an innovative approach to managing and staffing legal work in the future. For example, more generalist work is in-house, leaving the specialist work to external sources. Rather than taking each matter and deciding on internal or external, clients can go even further and use e-billing technology to break a matter into phases, with some phases done internally and others done externally.
8. Changed working models: While much legal work gets done by remote working and good technology and communication systems in place – some work done by the legal department and the law firm is less easy to do remotely, for example, HR or disciplinary issues. It is not easy to have specific conversations over a video link; they must be face-to-face. We believe law firms and clients must find a solution to this problem. However, working from home can have other benefits, like allowing for more flexible working hours. Some individuals may find it easier to work unsocial hours – maybe in the early morning or the evening and this can be useful if working with non-Europe based colleagues, for example, to cover the working time in (say) the USA or Asia.
9. Mental and physical health of employees: One key feature that has come to the fore during the pandemic is that of health and well-being – both mental and physical – not just in the workplace but also in the home and broader society. Many organizations were quick to try and assist staff working in a new environment in various ways, for example, by giving grants for purchasing specialist chairs and equipment. Certainly, if staff continue to work from home in the future, even for only one or two days a week, maintain this kind of support. Although many organizations were already proactive in this area, more companies now provide access to CBT and other stress management services. They are more willing to discuss these issues openly and without stigma. However, there are now new debates about the vaccination status of staff returning to the office, with some organizations saying that unvaccinated staff may not be allowed to return. This issue will no doubt run on over the coming months.
10. Dealing with work backlogs: Obviously, the pandemic impacted those law firms involved in the justice system from the start of the pandemic – for example, the UK suspended jury trials at the beginning of the first lockdown. Some other cases did continue as the courts introduced video conferencing and other technology. Even though jury trials have been resumed, with strong COVID-19 precautions in place, there is a massive backlog of cases in all the courts caused by the requirements of remote working and other restrictions placed on all parties involved.

IN SUMMARY

So, what has living and working through the pandemic in the past two years taught us? The pre-pandemic trend for some people to work from home became the “normal” way for those who could work. No doubt there will be a return to the office, but many people believe we will see a more hybrid way of working with WFH (at least part-time) becoming accepted. However, we believe that working from home will not be the universal standard as organizations have realized that a degree of office-based working is still needed – especially for the less experienced staff who require more personal mentoring and colleagues’ support in the real than the virtual world.

The pandemic accelerated developments in collaboration and communications technology. These applications will become more mainstream in our work and personal lives.

Finally, all organizations working in the legal profession know that changes are inevitable, and the pandemic has highlighted the need for a review and transformation of organizational structures, new ways of working, a re-prioritization of projects, and increasing flexibility and agility in the approach to delivering successful outcomes.

Written by Bryan King

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