OPS Using Data to Foster Trusted Partnerships
Aaron Pierce of LexisNexis talks about the many benefits of legal management solutions like CounselLink, from tracking legal spend to improving communication with outside vendors and creating stronger relationships. CCBJ: Let’s talk about CounselLink’s role in supporting law departments. Aaron Pierce: CounselLink is a cloud-based enterprise legal management solution for corporate legal departments. I like to think of it, basically, as a platform that enables insights and efficiencies within the legal department. It provides work management capabilities for handling the legal work that in-house counsel does. It also handles legal spend management capabilities for all of the various law firm and vendor invoices that flow through the legal department. And most recently, we’ve also been growing its set of vendor management capabilities, which allow for legal operations to better track and understand all of the work that their outside vendors are providing for them.
Vendor and legal service provider management is a
widely discussed pain point for law department executives and legal operations professionals, and the question they want answered is, “How can law departments gain insights that help them better evaluate their existing vendors and legal service providers?”
The key to improving any system is, first, being able
to measure it. If you’re not collecting data, both objective data points and subjective data, you can’t even begin to properly rate or compare or identify trends. It doesn’t have to be a huge program. It doesn’t have to be a big corporate initiative. You can start with just one or two data points, then collect more data based on your needs as you go along. Maybe you just want to look at how well firms are complying with your guidelines, or maybe you want to see how often you’re engaging in detailed hourly billing arrangements versus alternative billing arrangements.
In CounselLink, for example, we have a vendor
scorecard tool that you can use to track some of those data points directly. Once you plot your vendors and put them on a chart, you can start to watch the trends CORPORATE COUNSEL BUSINESS JOURNAL
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