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.

Congratulations! You have implemented a legal spend management solution, the legal department is saving money, and legal spend metrics are starting to positively impact department processes. Breaking legal spend into fees and costs, viewing information by firm and case, and identifying trends have never been easier with the new system in place.

Relationships with outside counsel have taken on increased scrutiny as companies become more focused on the administration of their legal departments in addition to the legal work they do.  General counsel are looking more closely at the law firms they hire, what they pay those firms, and the outcomes of the cases they’ve handled.

In the past several years, corporations have increasingly viewed their legal and risk services departments as regular business units.  Instead of functioning as an autonomous unit without the pressures of budgeting, forecasting, and accountability towards the bottom line, legal departments are now being tasked with contributing to the overall health of the organization.  However, not all departments have the operational manpower to accomplish these tasks in-house.