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Is your Legal Department losing on Legal Spend?

by PracticeLeague

The demand for legal services has seen a steep increase in the past decade where legal departments are both resource and budget constrained, and constantly faced with the challenges of cost rationalization and control of expenditure, especially legal spend management regarding outside counsel and expenses incurred in overall case management process.

The legal executives are in bedlam when determining their legal spend while spending a significant amount of time responding to a mounting number of individual payments and invoices from law firms that are scattered across several platforms, such as emails, ecosystems, spreadsheets, etc.

Legal teams, therefore, must take a disciplined and strategic approach to legal spend management, so they are armed with the necessary data to enforce real change. An effective legal spend management software like PracticeLeague Legal Spend Management platform enables corporate legal departments to manage cost-effectively and bring better visibility and oversight on their outside counsel spend – and other legal costs.

Integrated Matter and Legal Spend Management Platform

The robust legal spend management platform allows in-house counsels to create and compare budgets and spending on various matters of the department with the ability to analyze internal and external costs separately. Counsels can manage their legal budget/accruals along with automatic spending-to-budget comparisons. The comprehensive and collaborative platform allows tracking claims and contingent liabilities along with expenses on account of all legal overheads, including counsel fees, court fees, out of pocket expenses and reimbursements. Expenses across matters can be analysed with a planned legal budget.

Improved Visibility on Legal Spend

Agile legal departments are adopting legal spend management software to eliminate repetitive and manual efforts of managing legal spend while gaining real-time visibility on budgeting and accruals, reporting, collaboration on matters, ultimately enabling legal departments to compare legal spending on a year to year basis. Having a system that proactively analyses these differences and provides an outline of your previous years spend in comparison to the present year, leads to a more accurate prediction and leaves zero scopes for errors. Plus, it reduces a lot of strain on your resources as you don’t have to do it manually.

Managing Outside Counsel Spend

Automated platforms like PracticeLeague Legal Spend Management allows for seamless collaboration among the legal department and their external law firms where External counsels can upload the invoices and the system will automatically check for any deviations between the agreed mandate and the uploaded invoices. Legal departments can then authorize the same for further processing. The system can also be enabled to electronically receive (LEDES), auto-route to approver and process invoices based on your workflow.

Reporting to C-Platform

Generating reports real-time on current and comparative legal budgets, performance of the budget, litigation exposure etc. which is to be presented to board and C-Platform can become the best practice for legal departments with a Legal Spend Management Software. This enables not only GCs with a precise visibility but also mitigate concerns that CFOs might have regarding accuracy of legal finances.

Opportunities to Reduce Costs

With a Legal Spend Management platform, legal departments get the opportunity to accelerate their reporting and managing of legal spend while enabling them to detect opportunities for reducing costs by practicing precautionary and proactive litigation. This also allows them to evaluate and compare legal spend to data-driven strategic decisions about budgets across current and future spending.

Unified Platform for Legal Departments

PracticeLeague Legal Spend Management is integrated with robust Enterprise Legal Management (ELM) platform that provides legal departments to compile and analyze legal expenses, claims, outside counsel fees, court fees, and other payables, which help in creating an accurate budget for each matter and the legal department in whole. With the entire process of Legal Spend/Matter management on fingertips, the synergy within the team is considerably improved along with additional benefits to streamline and seamlessly generate efficiency in the Legal Department.

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