Enterprise Legal Management

During the past 30 years, corporate legal departments made the move from paper case files, word processing documents, and Excel spreadsheets to what is now the industry standard: enterprise legal management (ELM) solutions that enable efficient and cost-effective control of matters, documents, contracts, and outside legal counsel. As a result, the function of legal departments has shifted from primarily managing legal matters and costs to acting as revenue generators that provide information and analytics valuable to the entire company. This article offers a primer about the primary components of ELM.

Components

The optimal ELM solution encompasses matter, document and spend management; legal hold; reporting; and analytics.

Matter refers to all the issues a legal department encounters protecting the entity it serves, and includes business transactions, intellectual property, human resources, sales, litigation, governance, risk management, and compliance. A legal department's ELM system can be designed to manage information about both typical and company-specific matters, ensuring documents are conveniently stored and readily accessible, deadlines are met, and compliance is complete and timely.

Imagine how much faster and more efficient decision-making becomes when all related documents are in one searchable space. Since the flow of documents into and out of a legal department can be overwhelming, a system that provides easy storage and retrieval is a must, particularly for e-discovery purposes and compliance requirements.

Spend management is just that: remaining within budget and even driving down expenses through e-billing and vendor management. An ELM system aggregates bills and invoices for secure delivery and payment. The ability to track and manage costs will likely become a General Counsel's favorite component.

Legal hold, a corporate-wide strategy that identifies discoverable data and ensures it is not inadvertently deleted, reduces e-discovery costs and improves compliance with rules of civil procedure. ELM systems integrate matter management with legal hold through multiple data sources and custodians without undue disruption. In this way, legal departments can create, maintain, and enforce a legal hold process to withstand judicial scrutiny if a matter ultimately requires e-discovery.

Reporting and analytics create reports and organize data to lower costs, improve performance, and compare productivity with other departments or even competitors. A relatively new feature of comprehensive ELM systems, analytics, is turning once under-appreciated General Counsel (GCs) into their companies' equivalent of rock stars by providing the ability to track legal outcomes over time as well as predict future outcomes using historical data. This in turn allows spending forecasts based on sound data. For example, a GC analyzing past outcomes using outside counsel can determine which matters will have similar outcomes and make an informed decision about when to retain outside firms and when to keep matters in-house.

Benefits

Controlling costs can be a GC's most persistent headache. In the past, a GC's highest aspiration was to be viewed as efficient, responsive and not too expensive. With an ELM system, the GC's role is elevated and corporate law departments can operate at a competitive advantage. Here are just a few ways innovative companies are using ELM solutions to reduce spending and drive change:

Fewer Outside Firms, Deeper Relationships

ELM systems allow a legal department to easily create “counsel evaluation” systems to select the most appropriate firm or lawyers with whom to build relationships and negotiate alternate rate structures to reduce spending and improve outcomes. Legal project managers can assign work to multiple providers without increasing risk but still bring projects in on-time and on-budget, resulting in significant savings. For routine work, legal departments can instigate competitive bidding.

Improved Productivity

Many large organizations continue to use a “silo approach” among departments or locations, leading to a variety of disparate systems housing important databases, spreadsheets, documents, and institutional knowledge. An ELM system changes all of that by enabling centralized storage and retrieval entity-wide. Handling and tracking legal matters is simplified, saving time, decreasing frustration, and lessening human error ' all leading to improved productivity.

Increased Collaboration

The most efficient legal departments strategically collaborate on cross-department functions that make the most sense for the company's overall good. More and more, particularly in highly regulated industries, legal professionals wear multiple hats across departments. Although corporate departments are intended to perform different functions, they can also work in tandem to craft a message, complete a project, or create value in a more effective and efficient way than if operating alone. For example, the matter management component of an ELM system enables a manufacturer's legal and risk management departments to efficiently collaborate. ELM integrates with the system: tracking consumer affairs, simplifying the transfer of information, automating the creation of a legal matter, and alerting the appropriate legal department personnel. Utilizing this efficient process between departments, a company can manage product recalls, product liability lawsuits, and public relations or mitigation concerns.

Leaner Support Staff

Since legal department operations are systematized and centralized, the support staff necessary to maintain structure and order in numerous locations is no longer necessary. Since the top ELM providers include implementation, hosting and training, everyone in the department ' even the most technology-challenged lawyers ' can learn and use the system without the internal support more traditional paper-focused law departments require.

Risk Mitigation and Enhanced Security

Data security and regulation may be the most important technological challenge for the coming year. Companies that anticipate increased regulation while innovating products and services that meet customer demand for data privacy will rise to the top of their industries. But data privacy is a complex and often confusing topic, involving fractured and incongruent cross-border laws and jurisdictional practices regarding data confidentiality, ownership, and seizure rules. Current U.S. and EU protocols and directives may no longer be sufficient to manage privacy risks. An ELM system helps global businesses manage evolving obligations by providing a single, flexible repository to organize the many laws and directives. Integrated compliance solutions consisting of regulatory intelligence and change management, incident and investigation tracking, and legal matter and policy management deliver a toolkit to both understand and mitigate regulatory and legal risks from data breaches. In this way, companies can potentially save billions in litigation costs, government fines, and fallout from reputation damage.

Relationship with IT

To become strategic in the use of ELM technology and to structure communications with IT departments, law departments should design a technology roadmap to create a landscape that aligns with the company's goals and vision. The roadmap could also act as a project manager for technology needs as they arise, justify the budget (to secure buy-in from leadership), and provide incentives to encourage high user adoption.

Building the roadmap with IT will additionally help the legal department understand the technical preferences and requirements of the company. IT can help the legal department understand the system's architecture, scalability, the soundness of the technology approach going forward and any security needs. Decisions about hosting, single-sign on, compatibility with existing software, and how integrations might be accomplished to further enhance the value of the an ELM system should include IT input. The system selected by the legal department can greatly impact the level of support and investment in terms of hardware and head count that IT may or may not already be delivering. Strategic planning creates a strong partnership with IT to give legal departments the competitive advantage to stay ahead of the curve, and ensure that systems selected are sustainable over time.

Conclusion

With an ELM system, slimmed-down corporate legal departments make the leap from cost centers to revenue generators, managing the storage and retrieval of all legal department data, including the creation, revision, approval, consumption, and analysis of legal documents. ELM systems facilitate improved and faster decision-making, accuracy, efficiency, and compliance as never before, while lowering risk and adding value to the entire enterprise.

Jason Parkman is the CEO of Mitratech, Austin, TX.