Legal Management Insights

Litigation budgets. Almost every client requires them, but what do you actually do with them? Do they get filed away with a checkmark to ensure that the law firm provided one? Do you enter the amount into your matter management system – without comparing actual spend to budget? Or do you have a robust system that allows litigation spend tracking and provides actionable intelligence on the management of your cases and law firm relationships? Litigation budgets serve multiple purposes, and identifying why you require them will help guide their level of functionality.

I recently had the opportunity to attend LegalWeek West in San Francisco, and the experience was incredibly rewarding. This was the first time that the LegalWeek conference provided a LegalOps educational track. Bringing together some of the leading innovators in the LegalOps field, it was exciting to hear their take on this burgeoning area of the legal industry. In addition to a review on the evolution of legal operations as a functional business area, speakers focused on benchmarking and metrics, as well as guiding change within an organization. As with most conferences, several themes emerged throughout the day, providing insight on the current state of legal operations.

Quovant was “on the move” at the 21^st annual America’s Claims Event in Charlotte, North Carolina. The 3-day conference focused on property and casualty insurance claims; specifically, how the insurance industry can capitalize on technological advances across the globe. While there, Quovant Client Account Managers Mené Jividen and Ashley Montgomery attended industry workshops and spoke with industry leaders regarding the growing need for legal-spend management and analytics in the insurance market and beyond.

How many lawyers does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Three: One to do it, and two to sue him for malpractice.

Psst -- can we talk for a minute?  I’m talking to all of you that work in corporate legal or risk departments that are utilizing a legal spend management (“LSM”) or legal bill review program.  Hopefully by now, you are taking full advantage of its services.  And if you invested in a quality LSM program (wink wink) then you should be experiencing custom invoice processing and review of your outside counsel invoices, line entry categorization for each fee and cost line reviewed, tailored business intelligence reporting, and personalized consultation services all available for you to better understand, manage, and optimize your legal spend strategy.  But now what - do you find yourself wondering what else Quovant does that can help you?  If so, then read on.

To celebrate National Pet Day, we went to the Nashville Humane Society to help care for their dogs and cats and donate some items to support the shelter. We even found a dog that would be a perfect addition to the Quovant family!

So, you successfully implemented your legal spend management solution and are starting to see a reduction in your legal expenses that results from participation in a bill review program. Great…now what? Although many that employ a legal spend management program do so for the instant hard dollar savings, the true benefit of a legal spend management solution is the actionable insight that comes from increased visibility into your data. Let’s explore a few ways you can begin taking advantage of the business intelligence reporting even without a trend-worthy amount of data.

Compliance review is a vital component of legal spend management. Compliance review, in terms of legal spend management, examines law firm invoices and compares them with how completely they conform with the client’s billing guidelines. In depth compliance review requires knowledge of the law firm, the law firm’s billing experience, the common practices of the legal industry, as well as insight into the particular body of law that is being practiced. Although the specifics of the tasks and costs vary between clients, there are a few consistent methodologies used to review legal invoices for compliance with client’s billing guidelines, including the objective and subjective review of invoices. The objective review is usually a surface level review that looks at the basics of whether the bill itself is complete and made without errors, and the subjective review digs into the meat of the work being completed to see how appropriate it is in light of the client’s overall litigation goals.

One general ideal of analytics is to drill down further and further into data while still maintaining a large sample size in order to gain meaningful insight into that data. When it comes to legal spend, data at the task level is more informative than data at the case level which is more informative than data at the law firm level, and so on. Therefore, the biggest benefit of the UTBMS framework is phase coding. With phase coding, line item entries of an invoice can categorized into one of five phases: case assessment, pre-trial pleadings/motions, discovery, trial, and appeal. The ability to break matters down into these subsets provides significant value in a few key areas.

Once you’ve generated internal buy-in for a legal spend management solution, you can switch gears and begin planning implementation. Rolling out a new solution doesn’t have to be complicated. A basic implementation can happen in three overlapping phases.