If you’re looking for ways to optimize your approach to e-billing and legal spend management but unsure if legal spend management software is right for your in-house legal operations, this article will help you identify five common pain points legal teams struggle with – and showcase how LawVu’s legal spend management and e-billing software can provide a cost-effective legal operations solution.

Let’s dive in!

Why now’s the time to prioritize legal spend management and e-billing

New data reveals that cost management is a critical success factor in our turbulent environment; legal leaders are increasing outside counsel spend, and operational efficiency is a top priority for in-house legal teams. These trends lead to one obvious conclusion: it is more important than ever to manage outside counsel spend and engagements effectively.

With just 39 percent of legal teams using a spend management or e-billing software, it’s no surprise that recent research from IDC found that one of the common causes of legal friction is the valuable time in-house teams spend on manual, administrative tasks related to outsourced work:

• 67 percent of legal teams are spending 1 to 3 hours per day manually managing invoice approvals and spend reporting
• Teams spend an average of 1.5 hours per day sending emails to law firms to get proposals, negotiate scope and ask for updates
• 69 percent estimate spending more than an hour each day searching email or other sources for matter history and outside counsel advice

With so many legal teams facing significant challenges in maintaining control over their budgets and keeping administrative tasks in check, automation to reduce the friction is in order – and it’s what e-billing and spend management software can help with.

Problem #1: You struggle with visibility over outside counsel spend

Many teams struggle with having real-time insight into what they’re spending on legal services. When asked for status updates, comparisons with previous years, or data to help forecast budget or make the case for in-house hiring, legal departments often find it challenging to provide accurate information swiftly (or at all).

How LawVu’s legal spend management solution helps:

• The solution starts by consolidating and digitizing your invoices in one platform: your legal team and firms can simply load invoices into the legal workspace instead of filing emails and putting data in spreadsheets. This regular process creates a consistent, structured workflow that standardizes data capture, resulting in a reliable data repository that anyone can access.
• With all your spend information in one place, you can take advantage of out-of-the-box reporting features and dashboards, and quickly export reports. This makes it easy to see everything you’re spending with your legal service providers, and what you’re spending it on. The ability to slice, dice, sort and filter information will give you insights to support actions like budget forecasting, board reporting, planning and quick decision making.

As invoices are centralized, interactive dashboards in LawVu’s spend management solution give real-time visibility into legal spend, including budget tracking, trends over time, invoice statuses and details about spending by providers, departments, and matters.

Problem #2: Your manual invoice review and approval workflows are slow and risky

Legal teams’ common reliance on emails and spreadsheets for handling invoice processes is slow and inefficient, with too much time wasted on low-level administrative tasks like data entry and manually sending reminders and status updates. It’s also prone to errors – which can lead to unreliable data and missed deadlines.

How LawVu’s legal spend management and invoice review helps:

• As described above, LawVu facilitates invoice uploads, by both in-house teams and outside counsel, into a centralized e-billing repository. Powered by AI data extraction to save legal team members time, this central source of truth ensures real-time tracking of invoices and reduces the risk of overlooking important details.
• With your invoices in one place, automation adds even more efficiency: as invoices are added to the system, features that automate invoice approval workflows, billing guideline review, and accrual management will keep people from sending emails, chasing status updates, allowing more time and ensure compliance with internal processes.

“We were constantly overwhelmed with emails and struggled to keep our information organized… now we use LawVu to keep our department and all our work organized, including the work we do with Legal Service Providers, and our LSPs say the platform is easy to use which saves us time in the invoicing process.” – Bridget Fuller, Senior Legal Assistant, Nabholz Construction 

Problem #3: You’re surprised by budget overruns

For many legal teams, unexpected budget overruns are a routine issue. It’s incredibly frustrating when the costs of legal matters exceed expectations without forewarning – but hard to stay on top of the progress and costs of matters that are being worked on with outside counsel when you don’t have an efficient way to create shared visibility and track progress.

How LawVu’s legal spend management solution helps:

LawVu’s spend management and e-billing solution allows legal teams to set a budget, agree on scope, and receive updates as a matter progresses – including tracking how invoices are impacting the agreed-on budget as they are received. This can all be done without having to chase information down in emails or spend extra time on data entry, creating a proactive approach that ensures teams remain informed and can manage legal spend effectively. This reduces the chance of surprise overruns and provides data legal teams can use to adjust expectations or have crucial conversations with outside counsel.

A matter in the LawVu legal workspace centralizes scope agreements, documents, updates, conversations and invoices, making it easy to track spend to budget as the matter progresses. 

Problem #4: You struggle with visibility and comparison of internal and external work

Without clear visibility and a complete data set, understanding and reporting on internal versus external legal work becomes a daunting task for in-house teams. Not having a complete picture makes it difficult to monitor and plan budgets, make adjustments to workload, and benchmark total legal spend. Plus, you might be paying for work you could do in-house – many teams find they duplicate work with outside counsel without knowing it.

How LawVu’s legal spend management solution helps:

Once again, a unified source of truth is the answer: LawVu is designed to manage the full lifecycle of matters, whether they are handled in-house or in partnership with outside counsel.

That means your in-house team doesn’t have to change workflows or learn a new tool to manage work with outside counsel, leading to better adoption and a reliable view of total workload.

These tree features of LawVu are especially crucial to helping you with holistic workload management:

• A unified, matter-centric design:

The LawVu platform is designed around the key concept of managing legal “matters”. A matter in LawVu holds key information about the work being done and securely stores all the emails, documents, tasks and updates related to that work in your repository. While a majority of matters are handled by in-house attorneys, when outside counsel is involved, additional features “just show up” to help you capture invoice, budget management and collaboration. This means your team doesn’t have to change workflows or learn a new tool to manage work with outside counsel, and your information is consistently structured – so you easily end up with one repository and one data set to work with.

• Intake and integrations: 

To have a clear picture of your total workload, you need all of it to funnel into your source of truth without too much effort. The legal workspace has features that help you do this consistently, with less burden on the legal team – including a “legal front door” for the business to raise requests and email integrations to load information into the system without leaving your inbox. So, no matter how a piece of work arises or when (and if) outside counsel gets involved, there are no obstacles to information making its way into LawVu.

• Dashboards and reports:

Now that you’re building that central source of truth as an outcome of day-to-day work taking place in LawVu, data is easily accessible for reporting and analysis. LawVu has out-of-the-box dashboards that make it easy to understand volumes of work being managed internally and externally, with many attributes you can use to slice, dice and drill down.

The general counsel dashboard in LawVu makes it easy to assess and communicate about your overall workload and includes visuals to compare internal and external work. 

Problem #5: You’re worried about keeping on top of communications with outside counsel

Email is an important method of communication – but it gets slow and risky when threads get long, multiple people are involved, and documentation is being shared back and forth. This is a common way for legal teams to work with each other and with their firms, but it can be a barrier to both speed and business continuity.

How LawVu’s legal spend management solution helps:

You can invite the attorneys from your firms to collaborate with you in LawVu – which means they can have direct access to the appropriate matter you’ve created on the platform. This will allow them to post and access documents, give and get status updates, tick off items in a task template, and securely engage in budget updates and embedded conversations. Moving these communications out of email means fewer manual touch points for everyone; it also results in a more robust system of record where policies, advice and documents you’ve received from your legal service providers are stored in a shared space that’s accessible to anyone.

“LawVu has improved our relationship with our panel law firms because through using the system it’s very clear the matters they are assigned and what we expect them to complete. There is a clear scope of work and they will always need to do an estimate of costs based on this, as opposed to having to communicate that every time or chase emails.” – Fiona McLeod, General Counsel, Nelson City Council

It’s time to take critical action

According to Gartner’s latest publication, “E-billing and matter management software remains critical technology for legal departments… because of its essential role in managing a long-standing and still key workflow.”

Without these tools, too many in-house teams are struggling with pain points that are the result of limited visibility, insufficient insights and inefficient workflows. By addressing these common pain points, LawVu is helping in-house legal teams to save time, cut costs and enhance their overall effectiveness – watch this video to see how:

Want to learn more about LawVu’s legal spend management and e-billing software, click here to book your personalized demo.