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Set Yourself Up for Success: Five Strategies to Improve Remote Work

The workplace has completely changed for most of us, and while hunkering down and working remote among the chaos, we’re not certain when we’ll return to our offices. While many executives at tech companies and professional services firms are used to working remote with some frequency, it’s probably not something corporate counsel is used to doing, so we wanted to share five considerations that will make your remote work a little easier during these uncertain business times:

  1. Set up a conducive workspace – We all do our best work when we have exactly what we need with us. This may involve quickly running back to the office to pick up your extra monitor for home use, getting extra printer cartridges for your home office or finding a great pair of Bluetooth headsets for those long conference calls. Using the same tools you’re used to or getting new ones to adapt to specific needs while working from home will help you do better work and save you from logistical headaches – both of which are worth the investment.
  2. Maintain a routine – Keeping a regular schedule is crucial to staying on task. This includes continuing to set an alarm and getting ready as you would for a regular day in the office. Just because you’re working from home and in a different environment doesn’t mean you can’t take your breaks – be sure to enjoy your lunch break and go on coffee runs when needed (if drive-through is an option for you right now, that is!).
  3. Determine tasks that can be outsourced, such as bill review – The last thing you want to worry about while working in a completely different environment, and with everything else going on, is the tedious demand of bill review. Quovant offers a suite of solutions to manage and monitor matters – including streamlined eBilling, comprehensive legal bill review and performance analytics. Now is an especially important time to monitor outside counsel costs. Whether you want a software solution to manage your own matter management and eBilling, or you need an experienced team to monitor billing compliance, review activity, and identify opportunities for efficiencies, Quovant can help.
  4. Mitigate distractions – COVID-19 has not only displaced many executives across the country, but has caused schools and daycares to close as well. When working from home with young children around, it’s important to have a private, enclosed space to focus during normal business hours. For those who don’t have a home office space, they can stake out the dining room table or temporarily move a desk into a bedroom. Make sure children (and their babysitters) know not to interrupt you, but do enjoy the benefits that this situation brings – such as eating lunch with the whole family a few times a week. Ensure your family (including your spouse) knows you’re keeping you regular hours and to not interrupt you until you’re done for the day. Working from home likely requires setting firmer boundaries with your family to ensure interruptions remain at a minimum.
  5. Encourage collaboration – Whether it’s an Intranet that team members can access from home or using one of the plethora of cloud document management tools available for companies, team collaboration is vital when the rest of your department (and company, as well as law firm partners) are also remote and working from different locations. Sharing files and documents this way is just as easy as when you’re in the office. Even simple platforms such as Google Docs make your work more convenient and help streamline collaboration. Tip: LegalBill from Quovant also supports collaboration for small to mid-size legal teams. From vendor and document management, to important emails and notes, LegalBill takes the complexity out of managing matters, vendors and invoices – and its starts at $175 per user/per month and includes a free 30-day trial!

By keeping the above considerations in mind and setting a few boundaries with your family (and yourself), you’ll surely set yourself up for success as you navigate and adjust to this ‘new normal.’ Remember, open communication with team members goes a long way – we’re all juggling various pressures and it’s important to lean on each other for transparency and support. We’re in this together!

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published to the Quovant site. After the 2022 Mitratech acquisition, the content was moved to the Mitratech site.

Ways to Streamline Corporate Legal Processes and Manage Legal Spend Amid COVID-19

As a result of COVID-19, we’re faced with a number of uncertainties and are navigating circumstances we haven’t seen in our lifetime. Difficult financial decisions are being made, we don’t know how long the recession will last, and we’re all working hard to keep our employees and clients happy and engaged – remotely! Leadership can’t freeze up. We must be able to act quickly, decisively and be comfortable making changes. While we’ve heard muses such as, “every good crisis should be taken advantage of,” we want to be sensitive to the unique complications this may pose for corporate legal departments and their operations. While this is not an exhaustive list, we hope you’ll consider the following to ease the current pressures on some of your legal processes:

  • Optimize Your Remote Work Processes – As employees adjust to 100% remote work, there is no better time to consider streamlining your legal processes. LegalBill from Quovant offers legal teams everything they need and nothing they don’t – eliminating the cost and complexity out of managing matters, eBilling, legal bill review and reporting. This is a mature industry that is saturated with complex ELM solutions that are often time consuming, costly and difficult to onboard. They simply do not meet the needs of today’s small to mid-sized legal teams. LegalBill solves these issues. It’s a powerful cloud-based solution and built on our nearly 30 years of best practices. Best of all,  it’s delivered with clear pricing (How does $175/per user per month sound?), turnkey installation and immediate value for you and your team. Learn more here and take advantage of our 30-day free trial.

  • Leverage Legal Spend Analytics – With financial optimization top of mind, you’re likely getting creative on how to reduce expenditures across the board and mitigate fees and expenses that aren’t mission-critical right now. With everything that you and your team have on your plate, the last thing you need to deal with is the tedious demand of legal bill review. Getting a closer look at hours billed, the legal personnel conducting those hours, adherence to legal billing guidelines, and more will help uncover key areas of opportunity for cost savings and streamline your legal spend at a time where you may need it the most. The best part? All of this can be handled externally through our managed bill review program. Click here to learn more.

We’re confident your plate is full and budgets are becoming tighter. It’s important to be pragmatic, act quickly and stay optimistic about our future. Quovant can be helpful and highly relevant in this time of uncertainty. We would welcome the opportunity to demonstrate how our solutions and insights can be easily implemented in days to see improved staff morale, enhanced visibility and cost savings.

While there’s no playbook for COVID-19, we have one for your legal spend and law firm performance analysis. Please reach out to our team today for more information on how we can assist in your success, now and for the long-term. We’ll get through this together!

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published to the Quovant site. After the 2022 Mitratech acquisition, the content was moved to the Mitratech site.

Key Metrics to Evaluate Outside Counsel Performance

Even with the greatest level of talent on your in-house legal team, you will at some point, need the services of external counsel. When an organization rates its outside law firms, selecting just the right data might be a challenge. Business leaders may not be lawyers, so it maybe necessary to rely on the self-assessment of firms to determine the “health” of their programs.

But does it need to be that subjective? Hard data is an essential tool when it comes to performance evaluation. There are specific metrics organizations can use to evaluate law firm performance. While it may not be “all about the money,” these key metrics can provide insight into how your panel handles its work and the value of the results you receive.

Guideline Compliance and Categorization

One of the most important metrics is understanding the spend itself. First, your legal panel must function within your billing guidelines. Admittedly, your guidelines should provide enough room for your legal team to do its work. Proper communication between in-house law departments and outside counsel involves an in-depth understanding of what they should bill for, and why. This sounds straightforward. But business leaders sometimes struggle to fully see the ways in which legal work contributes to legal and risk management strategies.

Outside counsel billing guidelines should describe what legal work is expected and how it should be delivered. When they submit invoices, you should be able to read the line item details and understand immediately whether they are acceptable expenses.

To assist in determining the reasonableness and acceptability of certain expenses, Quovant’s proprietary, common language categorization elevates your invoices beyond the traditional – and, often misapplied – Uniform Task Based Management System (“UTBMS”) coding. Application of the common-language codes results in easy-to-understand and actionable billing data that tells a better story around your spend.

Budgeting

Once legal spend is better understood, allocations can be made to specific phases and activities. A seasoned law firm should be able to assess a claim and provide a budget estimate, as well as have the capacity to work within a budget. Quovant captures case budgets and provides notifications to team members when a certain amount of the budget is met, as well as reporting around the number of cases satisfactorily concluded within budget.

Benchmarking

Knowing your current spend on outside resources supports modifications to your existing panel and plans for future use of new outside attorneys. Industry-wide information helps you to make better, data-driven decisions around your panel. You can identify potential relationships with new firms and renegotiate arrangements with existing partners. Armed with data, you’ll know whether the local market is competitive or sparse, bolstering your power to negotiate more advantageous rates.

Further, metrics gathered from law firm invoicing allow for a comparison of your firms’ performance to other similarly-positioned firms (e.g. in a specific state) and cases. Quovant offers access to external data so that you can benchmark your legal spend against others in a given industry.

Data Makes the Difference

By using these select key metrics, you will be better positioned to establish reasonable expectations and rate outside counsel efficiency and efficacy.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published to the Quovant site. After the 2022 Mitratech acquisition, the content was moved to the Mitratech site.

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