The Key to ELM Success Is Creating A Great User Experience

Creating an Enterprise-Strength Ecosystem

Terms such as “integration,” “consolidation,” and “unified” turn up frequently in discussions about the design and implementation of an ELM system and there are good reasons for this. On one hand, the underlying technology platform needs to provide industrial-strength components, including toolkits and a robust data warehouse. However, it is at the application level that users interact with their ELM solution on a day-in, day-out basis. This is where the rubber meets the road. And it is why an ELM technology platform must meet very specific requirements from a UX perspective if it is to succeed in a sustainable way.

In the face of increasing complexity, achieving a high-quality UX for users of an ELM system must include a seamless merging of functionality across the key pillars ' legal matter management, legal spend management, and governance, risk and compliance (GRC). Overall, the UX should reflect a consistent experience across each component, while meeting some important goals:

• Simplifying the way staff works, improving collaboration not only among internal teams but with external service providers. For example, an ELM system should make it easier to partner with outside counsel on early case planning, supporting real time submission, review and approval of budget estimates or initial case assessments. Making optimal use of data from across systems and departments mitigates risk while empowering teams to strategically manage legal matters, compliance, and their associated costs. For instance, dashboards should track performance across the legal and compliance functions, while offering drill-down capabilities for more detailed analysis and providing key insights faster.
• Ensuring that the technology can rapidly adapt to support new or unexpected business needs. Any good ELM system offers customizable workflows that support specialized processes and best practices. As business processes change or get rolled out across a global organization, these workflows should be able to evolve, reflecting new steps or additional scope whenever needed.

An effective ELM solution naturally drives down the cost of ownership by increasing efficiency and providing an ongoing basis for more strategic decision-making.

Seen in this larger context, it's easier to grasp the importance of designing a UX that supports all of the elements that make up an ELM ecosystem. For example:

• Legal Matter Management is an area where legal department performance can be optimized, enabling more strategic and efficient management of matters and legal risk. Importantly, legal matter management constitutes a layer of ELM where the day-to-day responsibilities of legal department staff can be made measurably easier through a rich and intuitive UX.
• Legal Spend Management goes to the heart of corporate counsel's ability to manage and reduce expenses. Detailed cost data from outside counsel, streamlined business processes, and actionable analytics are critical to managing relationships with outside counsel more effectively. Well-designed UX elements such as role-based views directly contribute to delivering the most relevant information, tasks, reminders, and reports to each team member.
• GRC solutions that are seamless, integrated and scalable are essential for ensuring organizational alignment with current regulatory, risk and business environments while remaining poised to rapidly respond to changing mandates and strategies. Here, the UX needs to support both day-to-day compliance tasks and strategic risk management ' the details as well as the big picture.

A User Experience That Evolves With The Business

The best ELM solutions must broadly complement adjacent core functions of the legal and compliance ecosystem to maintain maximum flexibility. There is a world of software providers that design best-in-class solutions that meet very specific needs within legal departments and compliance organizations. A truly enterprise-level system allows for the integration of these technologies and their data into the processes and reporting of the ELM system. The ability to work cohesively with preferred partner technologies, such as a Service of Process, Legal Hold, or Document Management solutions, allows for an agile approach to organizational management that adapts to a changing business environment and evolving best practices.

In addition to providing legal ecosystem tools, an ELM system should also act as a centralized data repository and a single toolset for creating reports that leverage data from across the enterprise. To meet the complex needs of the organization, it must be able to access data from the core platform while integrating seamlessly with applications and modules from multiple systems, even those used by other departments, as well as external benchmark data. In addition to providing enhanced decision support for users, this kind of powerful extensibility simplifies reporting administration and support, ensuring a positive user experience that leads to smarter, faster decision making and added confidence in those decisions.

The management of legal, risk and compliance activities is certain to grow more complex and challenging as time goes by. The art of ELM is in managing that complexity in an intuitive manner, presenting complex processes and tasks in a way that is simple and straightforward for the user. A fully collaborative enterprise-scale solution that puts the user's needs first pays for itself by increasing efficiency and transparency, aligning operations with corporate goals, and transforming the legal and compliance organizations into true business partners.

Linda Hovanec is Senior Director, Product Management-Core Markets, for ELM Solutions.

The tasks involved in managing legal, risk and compliance functions aren't simple: Keeping up with a changing regulatory landscape; collaborating with outside counsel; ensuring the best value in vendor relationships; showing senior management the contribution of the legal team; demonstrating continuing improvements in regulatory compliance; and keeping it all in line with corporate goals. Legal and compliance teams are responsible for these and many other tasks that are both very important and extremely complex. But when all of this takes place with the support of a comprehensive Enterprise Legal Management (ELM) solution with a well-designed and holistic user experience, it can all be executed with confidence and efficiency.

Implementing an ELM technology platform is about solving problems. It involves confronting classic friction points such as isolated information silos, inefficient reporting, and the resulting process gaps. In the course of addressing such issues, there is an important perspective that, surprisingly, is sometimes overlooked: the user experience. Any successful enterprise-scale solution must act as a single, secure and collaborative framework supporting legal, risk and compliance activities in ways that help reach the client's goals and provide a positive user experience (UX).

The term “user experience” in its larger sense includes all aspects of the end-user's interactions with a company, its people, products and services. It's important to distinguish the total user experience from the user interface (UI), which generally refers to the particulars of how users interact with specific functional elements within the application itself. The first requirement for an exemplary UX is to meet the needs of the customer as intuitively and simply as possible. A user should always know that their ELM system has the information they need to properly manage the legal and compliance functions. They should be able to count on it as a powerful tool that can aid in their success by delivering visibility into their operations and performance and providing data on which to base sound, forward-looking decisions.

Creating an Enterprise-Strength Ecosystem

Terms such as “integration,” “consolidation,” and “unified” turn up frequently in discussions about the design and implementation of an ELM system and there are good reasons for this. On one hand, the underlying technology platform needs to provide industrial-strength components, including toolkits and a robust data warehouse. However, it is at the application level that users interact with their ELM solution on a day-in, day-out basis. This is where the rubber meets the road. And it is why an ELM technology platform must meet very specific requirements from a UX perspective if it is to succeed in a sustainable way.

In the face of increasing complexity, achieving a high-quality UX for users of an ELM system must include a seamless merging of functionality across the key pillars ' legal matter management, legal spend management, and governance, risk and compliance (GRC). Overall, the UX should reflect a consistent experience across each component, while meeting some important goals:

• Simplifying the way staff works, improving collaboration not only among internal teams but with external service providers. For example, an ELM system should make it easier to partner with outside counsel on early case planning, supporting real time submission, review and approval of budget estimates or initial case assessments. Making optimal use of data from across systems and departments mitigates risk while empowering teams to strategically manage legal matters, compliance, and their associated costs. For instance, dashboards should track performance across the legal and compliance functions, while offering drill-down capabilities for more detailed analysis and providing key insights faster.
• Ensuring that the technology can rapidly adapt to support new or unexpected business needs. Any good ELM system offers customizable workflows that support specialized processes and best practices. As business processes change or get rolled out across a global organization, these workflows should be able to evolve, reflecting new steps or additional scope whenever needed.

An effective ELM solution naturally drives down the cost of ownership by increasing efficiency and providing an ongoing basis for more strategic decision-making.

Seen in this larger context, it's easier to grasp the importance of designing a UX that supports all of the elements that make up an ELM ecosystem. For example:

• Legal Matter Management is an area where legal department performance can be optimized, enabling more strategic and efficient management of matters and legal risk. Importantly, legal matter management constitutes a layer of ELM where the day-to-day responsibilities of legal department staff can be made measurably easier through a rich and intuitive UX.
• Legal Spend Management goes to the heart of corporate counsel's ability to manage and reduce expenses. Detailed cost data from outside counsel, streamlined business processes, and actionable analytics are critical to managing relationships with outside counsel more effectively. Well-designed UX elements such as role-based views directly contribute to delivering the most relevant information, tasks, reminders, and reports to each team member.
• GRC solutions that are seamless, integrated and scalable are essential for ensuring organizational alignment with current regulatory, risk and business environments while remaining poised to rapidly respond to changing mandates and strategies. Here, the UX needs to support both day-to-day compliance tasks and strategic risk management ' the details as well as the big picture.

A User Experience That Evolves With The Business

The best ELM solutions must broadly complement adjacent core functions of the legal and compliance ecosystem to maintain maximum flexibility. There is a world of software providers that design best-in-class solutions that meet very specific needs within legal departments and compliance organizations. A truly enterprise-level system allows for the integration of these technologies and their data into the processes and reporting of the ELM system. The ability to work cohesively with preferred partner technologies, such as a Service of Process, Legal Hold, or Document Management solutions, allows for an agile approach to organizational management that adapts to a changing business environment and evolving best practices.

In addition to providing legal ecosystem tools, an ELM system should also act as a centralized data repository and a single toolset for creating reports that leverage data from across the enterprise. To meet the complex needs of the organization, it must be able to access data from the core platform while integrating seamlessly with applications and modules from multiple systems, even those used by other departments, as well as external benchmark data. In addition to providing enhanced decision support for users, this kind of powerful extensibility simplifies reporting administration and support, ensuring a positive user experience that leads to smarter, faster decision making and added confidence in those decisions.

The management of legal, risk and compliance activities is certain to grow more complex and challenging as time goes by. The art of ELM is in managing that complexity in an intuitive manner, presenting complex processes and tasks in a way that is simple and straightforward for the user. A fully collaborative enterprise-scale solution that puts the user's needs first pays for itself by increasing efficiency and transparency, aligning operations with corporate goals, and transforming the legal and compliance organizations into true business partners.

Linda Hovanec is Senior Director, Product Management-Core Markets, for ELM Solutions.