Optimized Legal Spend Management: The Power of People + Technology
Many legal departments rely on disparate technology (and sometimes technology alone) to handle their legal bill review processes. While the right eBilling software is certainly a big part of the equation, neglecting the human element can cause legal teams to miss out on opportunities to identify pressing trends specific to their matters, areas for cost savings or analysis lacking important context. At Quovant, we firmly believe legal bill review processes are most efficient when managed through a combination of software, automation and people. Here are our top three reasons why:
- There are elements to the legal bill review process that are untouchable by software alone and that require human comprehension. Consulting a team of professionals who leverage intelligent software solutions and deploy the right human expertise to handle these matters is often the difference between wasted and worthy legal spend. Technology alone often won’t account for nuanced, contextual details around things like time task appropriateness, the legal personnel performing the work, and overall adherence to legal billing guidelines. Tapping into the knowledge and capabilities of dedicated legal bill review experts is sure to grant legal teams greater visibility and control over their spend and patterns within it.
- This strategy scales with a company’s needs as it grows and evolves. A standard Enterprise Legal Management (ELM) software solution won’t automatically know when a legal department’s needs change or if their company is growing, restructuring, downsizing, etc. Just as organizations evolve and improve, so should their solution-suites.Quovant’s team of legal professionals, compliance analysts and business intelligence experts are well-versed in a wide variety of matters and practice areas – so they know exactly what to look for when optimizing a legal department’s spend, ensuring compliance and automation of the right processes. Having this added level of support and consultation will prove especially beneficial as companies respond to the uncertainty and change that is sure to come from COVID-19.
- It doesn’t have to be an “all or nothing” approach. Many companies may not want to move away from their current ELM software due to contractual obligations, time and resource commitments or simply the fear of change. Unfortunately, these things can keep legal departments from seeking better services even when there are obvious gaps in performance. With Quovant, companies can layer additional services – such as expert bill review, intelligent trend and rate analysis, and advanced attorney scorecards and benchmarking – onto their current ELM system to drive more value. These solutions involve careful consultation and expertise from our team and offer legal departments the ability to fully configure their solution-suites to better suit their immediate and long-term needs.
We want to help legal teams more easily uncover the right data and access services that result in better decision making, operational efficiencies and cost savings. At the end of the day, this requires a comprehensive solution-set led by expert guidance.
Have questions about stepping up your legal spend management approach? Learn more about our Managed Bill Review program here.
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.
This post was originally published under the Quovants’s legal spend management. After the 2022 Mitratech acquisition, the content was moved to the Mitratech site.
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:
- 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.
- 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!).
- 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.
- 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.
- 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:
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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.
Why Outsource Legal Bill Review?
Corporate legal departments are seeing an increase in their caseload, with the majority of that work being assigned to outside counsel. That has been the trend for several years now, according to a Thomson Reuters survey of more than 1,000 corporate legal departments.
That study also found that companies were increasingly focused on managing the legal spend through a number of methods, including outsourced legal bill review (LBR). The question for a busy corporate legal department is whether LBR should be performed in-house or whether they should outsource those functions to an LBR expert and focus on higher value work.
In this article, we will review some of the most compelling reasons to outsource your company’s LBR and explain why it’s better for the legal department, the company, and your outside counsel.
It’s Better for the Corporate Legal Department
Some companies have chosen to keep the LBR process in-house. At least on the surface, that seems to make sense. After all, the corporate legal department is staffed by attorneys and legal support staff who know the company and its legal objectives. They typically know the facts of each case and can make an informed decision on whether outside counsel is billing fairly and accurately.
Let’s face it, no one goes to law school to become an accountant. Often, reviewing legal bills is seen as a tedious distraction from the corporate lawyer’s day-to-day responsibilities and focus on the matter(s) at hand, law firm relationships and performance. Further complicating the entire process is that they may not review bills thoroughly or fully enforce billing guidelines because they often view their law firms as partners and may have even come from an outside firm. These are clearly a conflict of interest that ultimately may end up costing the department and the company more money.
Many corporate legal departments have tried to alleviate this problem by hiring staff specifically to audit legal bills. The problem is that it’s nearly impossible to hire the “right” number of people with the right expertise for this task. If you’re staffing with paralegals or similar staff for bill review, there will likely be significant training involved. Furthermore, competent legal bill reviewers are in high demand so once you train up your internal associates there is a greater risk they will flee to higher paying opportunities. This could set you back six or more months while you train up the next associate.
Finally, the workload ebbs and flows from month-to-month. In-house reviewers can be overwhelmed one month and underutilized the next. In those slower months, the company ends up absorbing the increased overhead. And, in busier months, the billing review process can fall behind, which results in poor performance or delays in bill approval.
All these problems are solved by outsourcing the legal bill review process. An experienced legal spend management partner should presumably have the expertise needed on staff, can adjust resources as needed, and the cost is always directly proportional to the need. Legal departments can keep headcount and costs down, while keeping the legal team happier and focused on high-value work.
It’s Better for the Company
Aside from achieving an acceptable legal outcome, companies are primarily concerned with keeping legal spend predictable and on or below budget. This is where an experienced legal spend management partner can shine. Because they are dedicated to this one task, legal spend management firms have the tools and resources needed to help clients develop or refine best practice billing guidelines and analyze and report on all the relevant factors that a company would use to predict and manage overall legal spend.
LBR experts can be used at every stage of litigation and across all practice areas. Going a step further, an experienced legal spend management partner can provide valuable insights into hiring practices and utilization. For example, one outside law firm might be the most cost-effective choice for “bet the company” litigation projects, while at the same time being unnecessarily expensive for routine matters. Or, one firm might be more efficient at document-intensive cases, but less efficient in others. LBR professionals can track the myriad variables that drive these kinds of decisions and without enforcement of the firms billing guidelines you cannot achieve these apples-to-apples comparisons and gain this valuable insight.
Then, there is the “know your craft” factor. That is, LBR experts are in the business of optimizing the accuracy and efficiency of legal bills and the billing approval process. They spend all day, every day, thinking about ways to streamline the bill review process and gain more and better insights from legal spend data. Just as corporate counsel might hire an intellectual property firm to handle a trademark dispute, an LBR firm brings that kind of expertise to the bill review and approval process. Like hiring an IP firm, the outsourced bill reviewer doesn’t entirely replace the corporate counsel, instead, they amplify the corporate counsel’s abilities in this critical area of responsibility. The net result is that the company gets a better result at a lower and more predictable cost – often with proven return on investment.
It’s Better for Outside Counsel
Unfortunately, legal bill review is sometimes seen as an adversarial task — one where legal departments search for ways to squeeze outside counsel for every penny. But, that’s not always the case. When run properly, a healthy LBR process actually benefits outside counsel.
That’s because the goal is not to reduce legal bills just for the sake of lowering costs. Rather, the legal bill review process is about ensuring that outside counsel is following the company’s billing guidelines. The goal is to identify problem areas and then fix them. It’s more about education than confrontation. More about transparency, accountability and enforcement.
As a result, outside law firms often benefit from outsourced bill review because the LBR provider will often complete the bill review process more quickly and resolve problems faster. The result is that legal bills are approved and paid faster than they’d see with a typical in-house team where bills may stack up for weeks or even months before they are reviewed, adjusted and paid.
Lastly, when a difficult issue does arise, a trusted LBR partner will have dedicated staff in place for outside counsel inquiries and a fair and robust appeals process so issues can be resolved in a timely, consistent and fair manner. This ensures that the relationship between corporate legal and outside counsel is never placed at risk.
Conclusion
Simply put, legal bill review is a necessary part of the corporate litigation management process. But that doesn’t mean the work has to be (or even should be) performed in-house. Outsourced LBR benefits all involved in the process. Corporate legal departments can stay lean and focus on their most valuable work. Companies gain control and predictability when managing legal spend and outside law firms benefit from a streamlined bill review process, resulting in faster approvals and payments.
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.
7 Critical Factors When Choosing an E-Billing Solution
Your legal e-billing is an important way to track and monitor your legal spend. It is how you know how much your legal services cost, but also what outside counsel is doing and how they are performing. This should give you ample information to decide how to manage these outsourced professionals. With the right e-billing software, you can bring powerful insight into this area of your business.
Sophisticated e-billing solutions also give you powerful data. Translated into in- depth analytics, that data shows you clearly where you might be overspending. It shows you in detail where your legal spend might be out of range in comparison with others in your industry. You can see trends in your legal costs and make use of contextual information that helps you make informed, sound business decisions.
To best leverage all of your resources, look for software that does more than simply digitize your traditional invoices — you need a solution that helps you rethink your approach to legal spend and matter management. Here are seven important factors to consider when choosing a legal e-billing solution.
1. Customized Workflow Management
Getting your billing information into the right hands is essential for proper workflow management. Your software solution should have the option to create a customized workflow, so the right person receives the right invoice at the right time. Invoices should flow through the workflows and approval process, while taking into account factors like visibility permissions or invoice approval thresholds. The software should be nimble enough to align with your unique workflow needs, minus any manual handoffs.
2. Powerful Matter Management
Effective matter management is critical in not only providing data indicators around the health, budget and status for each matter, but also provides a level of instant visibility across all of your matters that traditional tools simply cannot replicate. Your software should be able to pair invoices with the correct matter so you can automate budget tracking.
You can now hone in on what matters are taking up the majority of your budget and which costs centers have been impacted the most. This empowers a strategic judgment of when it is time to go in a new direction or even “pull the plug” on litigation efforts. It also gives you strong data and baselines that can challenge your priorities, as well as your resources at hand.
3. Customizable Rules Engine
Your software should have intelligent features that do much of the work for you. A customizable, web-based rules engine lets you predetermine what line items you want to automatically flag, adjust, or reject. This means there is no more approval of expenses that are not in line with your budget or guidelines. Your software should also present you with the ability to adjust on your own after the rules engines takes the first-line objective review. That way you can take into consideration any unique one-off situations or arrangements you may have set up with your law firms.
4. Intelligent Invoice Review Process
In order to perform due diligence on your costs, the best legal billing software should have intelligent review functionality. This allows you to drill down to understand what is behind every charge so you can take that information into discussions regarding your law firm panel, performance, and more.
5. Customizable Reporting & Powerful Data Analytics
It is essential that reports are easy to produce and easy to understand. The solution should provide built-in dashboards and reports that are simple to adapt to your business and/or department. Report customization and data interaction capabilities are also key to helping you address your needs on the fly.
6. Ease of Use
All of these results should come through an interface that’s easy for your team to implement and use. All the “bells and whistles” are meaningless if your staff members are frustrated. Data in and of itself is not “business intelligence” if it’s not put into proper context. Your solution should be intuitive and should be backed up by a responsive and experienced customer service team.
7. Solid ROI
Any solution is an investment, but superior solutions should actually improve your bottom line. By reducing inefficiencies, and providing in-depth data that gives you strategic insights, the solution should have a demonstrated return on investment.
With these features, your legal billing software does more than reduce paperwork and manual processes. It should help you uncover savings AND deliver the legal analytics and insights you need to improve overall performance.
LegalBill by Quovant takes the complexity and cost out of managing matters, invoices and legal bill review — a powerful cloud solution built on more than 20 years of best practices and delivered with clear pricing, turnkey installation and immediate value for you and your team.
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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Examines the reasons why data has become vital to forward-thinking corporate legal departments, and how leg...
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