LawVu supporting legal operations for impact

As industry leaders, this value based and integrated kidney and cardiovascular healthcare facilitator, drives real and meaningful change to more than 50,000 patients across the United States. Michael Vitko, Senior Manager of Legal Operations, is part of the 10- person (and growing) legal team supporting the many facets of his teams’ legal function and the wider business. As Senior Manager of Legal Operations, no two days are the same for Vitko. Efficiency is the overall objective of his role, which he seeks to continuously foster and enable, and when it comes to measuring the efficiency of his legal function, it’s data and metrics that he relies on.

The legal workspace, a consolidated approach

Vitko says that prior to LawVu, his team didn’t have a comprehensive tech solution, nor did it support the core purpose of their legal operations. “There was no system or means to take a record of the questions we were being asked or for the assistance that was requested – it was very much a piecemeal approach.” At one point, the team started using a data repository, however Vitko says it was only to store their fully executed documents and it was hard to customize let alone gain any metrics from it.

“If something came in via email, where was it being tracked? If something came in via a conversation or chat, where was it being tracked? The only thing we were tracking loosely was contracts. Even still, we had no idea how much work we had on or how much time was being spent on each matter, let alone how many matters there were,” explains Vitko.

“We knew we were working harder, not smarter, and we needed to get our arms around the workload we didn’t even know existed – and that extended beyond contracts,” says Vitko. Knowing this, it was time for him to change tack by implementing LawVu’s legal workspace – a legal tech solution that enables his team to manage all their work, including contract management and matter management, in one consolidated system. By implementing LawVu, Vitko and his team gained greater visibility and were able to get a grasp of all their work in play within one legal workspace – and quickly at that!

“When we gained that visibility by consolidating all our workflows within LawVu,and implemented (and followed) processes, the time savings and efficiency within our team started to quickly unfold,” says Vitko.

According to Vitko, time-to-value was instant, “it was a super-simple implementation process; within four hours we had the team using LawVu.”

LawVu connector for Power Platform with Power Automate in Microsoft 365

Taking their ways of working a step further and aligning with Vitko’s efficiency objectives, the legal team didn’t stop with LawVu’s out-of-the-box capabilities. Instead, Vitko turned to LawVu’s connector for Power Platform to create his own bespoke, automated workflows, automating the mundane and error-prone tasks the team was experiencing.

“From a Power Automate standpoint, it’s almost like whatever you can think of you can do. I can automatically create a matter or create a contract and add my contract to that matter, update and place individually itemized tasks based on the record type and based on who it’s coming from and so on. I can customize LawVu through Power Automate to suit our legal function and the work we do,” says Vitko.

Gained visibility and data to create measurable impact

Utilizing Power Automate, Vitko developed and implemented various automations, including one to track legal service time metrics. “By tracking legal service time, we were able to identify that we were grossly understaffed, and we were able to substantiate this with the metrics uncovered by LawVu and accordingly hire new team members,” he explains. Being able to substantiate the cost benefit of increasing the internal headcount over outsourcing work to external counsel in order to manage workloads and better their service delivery to the business has been pivotal.

“Power Automate is amazing. From what I’ve been able to build and implement so far on my own – it’s not just saving time and driving efficiencies, it’s saving human error too!”

Another automation developed by Vitko supports the team’s contract execution process while contributing to their enriched data repository. As a result, he says that they’ve shaved weeks off their execution timeline. “Our average timeline on a MSA was twenty-one business days. Now we’re getting through them in six days. When we shared our metrics with the board, they were shocked. That’s efficiency gains at its finest; that’s the purpose of my job in legal operations.”

A legal tech solution for the entire business

While Vitko can explain in detail the extent by which LawVu’s connector for Power Platform has elevated the efficiency of Vitko’s legal function, he also shares how greater visibility and improved service delivery has impacted the wider business.

“Implementing LawVu has given more trust and credibility to the legal team because we can truthfully say how soon and when something will be completed, or what the status is. It’s no longer a guessing game.”

Certain functions outside of the legal function, with access to self-service tools within LawVu’s business portal, benefit from the visibility and access to self-service legal support as well. Vitko shares how business users describe LawVu’s self-service capabilities: “This [the business portal] is fantastic. It’s wonderful, it’s amazing. And you can see everything so clearly! It’s all there.” He is looking forward to welcoming more business users to take advantage of the functionality.

Looking ahead

Identifying and developing optimizations and efficiency gains within LawVu is how Vitko plans to continuously support his teams’ legal operations, the legal function and the wider business on the whole. “We plan to go the distance with LawVu. Whatever you’re producing we’re going to mirror and evolve it in our own processes. As long as I [legal operations] keep us in efficiency mode, and our metrics are favorable, everyone is happy,” he says.