What’s the True ROI of Legal Management Technology?
A new white paper we’ve just published draws on user interviews and research to document the value of legal management technology for legal teams of all sizes.
Large corporate legal teams have long benefited from Enterprise Legal Management (ELM) platforms – powerful, single-source-of-truth technology solutions that automate many of the repetitive tasks associated with matter management and spend management operations.
Given the reductions in workload provided by ELM, and the economies of scale of the Fortune 500 where teams of dozens or hundreds of attorneys and staff are common, it was easy to demonstrate strong ROI through implementation of these platforms. For small and mid-sized organizations, however, justifying an investment in legal management technology has been no easy task.
The questions that legal and business decision-makers in smaller organizations have had to grapple with are many and complex. Will an investment in a Legal Operations SaaS solution deliver real return on investment? How long will it take for that ROI to manifest? Is the team big enough to see a decent result? Would that result depend on staff adoption?
These are all important questions – and have been difficult to answer without actually putting a solution in place and seeing firsthand how legal management technology works within your organization.
The key uncertainty for smaller legal teams of ten to twenty isn’t just “are we big enough to see positive results?” but, will a legal management platform…
A) Deliver benefits to the overall organization that would…
B) Enable the business to grow faster, and…
C) Scale accordingly as the legal team expands over time?
Understanding & justifying investment in legal management technology
Our new white paper, The ROI of Legal Management Technology, takes a deep dive into these questions and comes up with the kind of detailed data that business and legal leaders can use to make fully informed decisions on investing in legal tech. Through a series of interviews with legal professionals and long-time users of legal management technology, the paper documents that by implementing a proven SaaS legal management solution, a 10-person legal department can expect to realize the following benefits:
Efficiency: A 6% efficiency gain across the entire legal team, which can add up to over $100,000 in staff time annually.
Money: Reduction in outside legal spend of $250,000 per year through automatic enforcement of billing guidelines, as well as a 75% reduction in the time spent reviewing and approving invoices.
Better Outcomes: Lowered occurrence of adverse events, decreased costs associated with adverse events.
The net-net? Research finds that legal management technology drives significant ROI even for legal departments of 5 to 10 team members.
This is only one example of what’s covered in the white paper. Based on user interviews and our own experiences with client ROI, we’ve included conservative (yet still compelling) calculations about the cost savings and efficiency gains these technologies can provide, and an 8-point checklist of best practices to follow in evaluating need, adopting a technology, and measuring its performance.
How to meet the “doing more with less” mandate
The reality for corporate legal today is that the pressure to do more with less increases by the minute. More than ever, legal departments fall under the microscope and feel the pressure to not only protect their companies from risks and legal challenges, but to drive value for their entire organization.
An effective legal management technology platform is a proven way of reaching these goals, but making the case for this kind of investment to an internal audience of legal, IT and business decision-makers can be a long, challenging process.
By downloading our white paper you’ll be able to cite the insights and positive experiences of other legal leaders as support for how legal management technology can make your department run as efficiently as possible. You’ll get the full picture of what kind of ROI to expect, and you’ll learn how to make a convincing case to invest in legal management technology and the many benefits it delivers on many fronts aside from the bottom line.
