Legal Spend Management

Bill Horne, Quovant CEO, was honored to participate in the Elevate Together Podcast, Voices of Change, Next Normal Leadership Series with Elevate’s Chairman and CEO Liam Brown.  The podcast focuses on turnaround leadership, leading and running a competitive law company, and the anatomy of legal spend management, along with solutions offered by Quovant and the value they provide.

Learn more about how Quovant helps companies build better relationships with their law firms based on mutual value.  Listen to the full podcast here.

2021 is a remarkable time to write a “predictions” piece. After all, we’re looking back at one of the most unusual years of our lifetime, continuing to face many of the challenges brought forth last year and grappling with a renewed understanding that well, we just don’t ever really know what the future holds.

That said, there is an unstoppable momentum, for which 2020 has emphasized the need and therefore accelerated change.  In this post, we’ll showcase three of the most important challenges and the solutions that are driving the industry forward this year.

#1.  Data & analytics will support the emphasis on cost-Savings, ROI and strategic business outcomes.

Economic uncertainties brought on by the ongoing pandemic have many organizations running lean and looking for additional opportunities to do more with less. For corporate legal departments, this means establishing and enforcing guidelines for outside counsel in order to gain predictability in legal spend and avoid other surprises.  In order to accomplish this, many companies are leveraging analytics in order to gain better visibility into their legal spend and performance of outside counsel firms. As Dan Hauck, chief product officer, NetDocuments said in Law.com’s article on 2021 predictions, “Analytics will be for everyone next year. New tools will make it easier to measure your personal productivity, spot trends, and identify areas of improvement—without the need for a manager to collect the data and call it out. Analytics are in demand because of technology advancement, user delight and demand. … Better ways of collecting and accessing this data are now readily available, so it’s possible to programmatically generate individual reports at scale that used to happen only at a department/team level.”

#2.  Accelerated Technology Adoption will continue to be driven by necessity.

The legal industry has long been known as slow to adopt new technology, but times are changing. As remote work continues and teams are pressured to achieve great levels of efficiency and performance measurement, technology can no longer be viewed as a “nice to have.” The Law.Com piece mentioned above, said that 2020 “will likely be remembered more as the Year of Adoption than the Year of Innovation. COVID-19 accelerated the use of collaboration tools, cloud technologies, video conferencing platforms and more to unforeseen heights.” This shift toward rapid adoption will continue for years to come. According to Gartner, legal departments will increase their spend on legal technology threefold by 2025.

#3.  Data Security Will Be Even More Critical in 2021.

With greater use of data and technology comes more cybersecurity risk. As sensitive data continues to flow between companies and firms, the legal industry will remain a lucrative target for data breaches. Attacks will continue to increase in scale and sophistication. Therefore, corporations and their law firms will need to leverage the latest security processes and standards to keep data safe. 

While we can’t predict exactly what 2021 has in store for legal tech, the industry is in a fortunate position to leverage innovations that have become available over the past few years to work as informed, safe, and efficiently as possible.

Have questions or would like to learn more about how Quovant can help your legal team prepare for 2021’s demands? Contact us today.

It’s an unconventional time for businesses of all kinds, and many are shying away from onboarding new processes or technologies for fear of change, additional costs or extended ramp-up times. While most organizations are looking at their bottom lines and expenditures with a critical eye, they may be failing to realize that stagnating their current processes is actually hindering greater efficiencies and cost savings at a time where they need it the most. To appease this, legal departments are likely resorting to more of the same – manual approaches and relying on an increasingly taxed legal team to perform thorough legal bill review and analyze law firm performance. Contrary to popular belief, ramping up with new, more modern solutions for eBilling and Matter Management isn’t as time-consuming or laborious as many believe it to be.

LegalBill from Quovant can typically be set up in a matter of days – and you can be productive in just a few hours – making a more immediate impact for companies looking to improve their approaches to eBilling, Matter Management, legal bill review and more. Other ELM solutions can take months to implement, deterring legal departments from even considering a move to automate. Our client success experts and intuitive technology ensure headache-free onboarding and expedited ROI.

If you and your team were contemplating new approaches for eBilling and Matter Management needs before the pandemic or are finding yourselves still falling short, you can still make a smart, quick and strategic move despite preconceived concerns. Here are a few things you should consider when choosing the best fit:

1. Can the software be easily implemented remotely and operate among distributed teams? It may be intimidating to onboard new technologies while teams are working from home, but Quovant’s expert team knows exactly what legal teams need from their ELM software – taking setup and customization off their plates and making the process as simple as possible.
2. How quickly and smoothly can the software be onboarded? Businesses don’t need results a few months from now, they need to address their pain-points today – and Quovant understands the immediacy of corporate counsel’s current operational and cost-saving needs. We can typically have LegalBill configured and implemented in a few short weeks and you can be productive on the platform on day one.
3. Can additional services be layered on top of current ELM software to address other problem areas? Another element of timing involves a legal department’s current contractual obligations with other ELM solutions or services. If you’re committed to a given service until next year, you may not think it’s possible to integrate Quovant’s services. Quovant’s experts can masterfully layer our expert bill review, analysis and reporting onto existing ELM solutions, filling problematic gaps and seamlessly addressing pain points.

While you are working remotely, taking care of your family and handling demanding workloads, the last thing you should have to focus on are the tedious demands of legal bill review and related administrative processes. With restricted budgets, added pressures and lack of adequate tools and resources, it’s easy to feel stuck or overwhelmed. Fortunately, you and your team can get set up with LegalBill quicker than any other ELM software solution on the market today. With immediate insights and analytics that lead to better business decisions, efficiencies and annual savings of 10% or more, you’ll be thankful you did. 

Interested in a free, 90-day trial of our leading ELM software for small to mid-size legal teams, LegalBill? Click here to learn more.   

Have questions about stepping up your approach to legal spend management? Learn more about our Managed Bill Review program here.