Legal departments in the energy industry face a complex mix of legal matters that require specific expertise within the sector, often spanning many state and international jurisdictions and involving varying complicated regulations. As a result, it is not surprising that a significant portion of legal budgets for energy companies goes into securing outside counsel with expertise in these legal matters.
When your corporate legal department (CLD) uses a large number of legal providers and makes a significant financial investment in them, getting the best value depends on monitoring and managing those providers well. However, many energy companies lack the necessary visibility into their legal spend to be confident that they are choosing the right forms and getting good value from them.
That’s alarming, considering that outside counsel are among your most important partners. Assigning the right law firm to the correct matter can yield significant benefits, including reduced case cycle times, faster resolution, improved quality, and reduced settlements. But questions remain:
- How can you get the most value from the law firms you engage?
- How do you provide appropriate feedback and resources to improve value going forward?
- How can you be sure that you choose the right firms for your matters?
Your CLD may not have a clear understanding of your spending trends with each of your law firms and may be missing opportunities for cost savings. Fortunately, there is a solution.
Enterprise legal management technology’s role in managing outside counsel
Enterprise legal management (ELM) technology encompasses a variety of tools that help CLDs manage matters, contracts, and legal spend more effectively. ELM technology uses in-depth analytics to provide business intelligence that enables data-driven decisions, which can help CLDs gain the most value from their outside counsel.
An ELM solution collects and tracks data throughout the management of matters and invoices to assist in increasing operational efficiency, reducing costs. Such a solution can also help improve your legal operations performance by streamlining workflows, improving collaboration, and allowing in-house attorneys to focus on the highest-value work.
Our new whitepaper, How Energy Companies Can Use Enterprise Legal Management Technology to Effectively Manage Outside Counsel, offers a detailed roadmap to energy industry legal departments looking to get the most from their legal service providers. In this whitepaper, you will learn how to:
- Use data to improve firm selection. Strategies such as panel management, law firm RFPs, and case assessments are useful. Panel management is the practice of assigning law firms to groups based on attributes like practice specialty, work area, and geographic location. RFPs establish rates and fees in advance, while case assessments estimate how much time and money will be required to handle a matter.
- Manage budgets and monitor billing guidelines to drive cost savings. An ELM solution can automatically monitor budget vs. actual spend and alert you when a firm is nearing its limit on a matter. In addition, it can check invoices against billing guidelines through customized business rules and provide rate benchmarks to help determine whether a proposed rate is fair.
- Gain visibility into law firm performance and diversity ratings. Law firm scorecards measure the effectiveness of outside counsel by integrating subjective questionnaire responses submitted by staff with objective data points. Research has also shown that firms that employ a diverse set of attorneys perform at higher levels; an ELM solution can capture diversity information as well.
These are just a few of the points addressed in the full whitepaper. Use it as your guide to getting a better handle on outside counsel costs, improving relationships with your law firms, and choosing the right firms for the right matters.
Download the whitepaper today to learn more.
