Enterprise Legal Management (ELM)

What is Enterprise Legal Management?

ELM is the practice management and operations strategy for corporate legal departments. It’s also a term for the group of technologies that make those operations possible.

Enterprise Legal Management encompasses the many components necessary to successfully run Legal Operations and fully integrate Legal as a strategic partner for the rest of the business. Enterprise Legal Management (ELM) is a range of practices, tools, and technologies that improve efficiency, reduce costs, enhance compliance, and streamline legal workflows for legal departments and organizations effectively manage legal matters,

ELM software

Typically, enterprise legal management software solutions include a range of different functions. These cover analytics, spend management, legal matter management, contract management, billing, intake, knowledge management and more.

By leveraging ELM software solutions, organizations can benefit from improved efficiency and accuracy across various aspects of their legal operations. More so, by automating processes with ELM software, teams can free up time usually spent on menial tasks, reduce costs, and improve productivity.

It includes:

Legal Matter Management

Faced with the challenge of managing thousands of new legal matters every year, from both internal and external sources, corporate legal teams recognized that managing this process manually isn’t an option anymore.

Not only do they need automation and control throughout a matter’s lifecycle, legal teams need a centralized source to manage the routine processes of opening matters, managing workflow, and running reports.

Legal management involves managing all activities surrounding corporate legal practice.

How does it help? By:

Reducing time and effort to open new matters. By automating matter opening, using templates and creating standardized processes, the right ELM software reduces the time it takes to open a new matter from 60 minutes to 15 minutes.
Establishing a central location for all matters. With a single source of truth in place, legal can ensure a complete and accurate database, which can later house comprehensive analytics to identify trends and proactively mitigate risk.
Managing costs – proactively. By centralizing matter data and increasing their visibility into matters, legal teams can better manage matter workloads and costs, saving 1.5% per year in external legal spend.

Legal Spend Management

If your legal department outsources any work to outside counsel firms, then legal spend management is an absolute must-have component of your overall ELM software suite to control costs, manage firm selection and engagement, and understand the true value being delivered by creating visibility into the trade-offs between cost and outcomes. Not to mention gain foresight into budgeting and future spend to improve the predictability of department results.

In essence, spend management is an enterprise legal management discipline that is concerned with giving corporate legal departments oversight of their outside counsel spend – and other legal costs.

Here are just a few of the benefits of legal spend management software:

Reduce legal spend and enforce billing guidelines
Reduce time spent processing and approving invoices
Track and report matter budgets by time period/matter phase and improve forecast accuracy
Automate the audit trail of bill modifications, including approvals, reviews, adjustments and rejections
Optimize firm and timekeeper selection through visibility and reporting
Realize a 5-10% reduction in annual legal spend

Reporting and Analytics

They’re central to effective ELM. If you don’t have the right reporting and analytics tools for driving actionable insights and value from Legal Operations, you may well fall behind any competitors that do.

Why? A growing number of leading legal departments have already driven competitive advantage for their companies through using data to:

Gain access to new patents and new markets faster than their competitors
Complete mergers, acquisitions and contracts more rapidly and at lower cost
Save hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars from cutting costs and improving efficiencies unlocked by data in their Legal department
Review outside counsel selection based on evaluating costs and outcomes

Reporting and analytics are one essential piece for making sure your enterprise legal management and legal operations are on the right side of history.