Getting Started with Enterprise Legal Management

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Annie: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's webinar, "Getting Started with Enterprise Legal Management." My name is Annie Triboletti, and I will be your moderator.

Joining us today are Andrea Jonaitis and Rich Casper. Andrea is a senior sales engineer in the Corporate and Legal Solutions Group at CSC. Since joining CSC in 2017, Andrea has specialized in global subsidiary management and entity management, working with prospects to present an accurate and clear scope of services, including helping subsidiaries stay in compliance as well as demonstrating CSC Entity Management. Rich is a product management director in the Corporate and Legal Solutions Group at CSC. Rich joined CSC with over 15 years of experience in enterprise legal management, implementing, developing, and managing matter and spend management solutions.

And with that, let's welcome Andrea and Rich.

Andrea: Good afternoon, everyone. This is Andrea Jonaitis. Thanks for joining us today.

Rich: Hello, everyone. Thank you. I'm Rich Casper. For today's agenda we'll be focusing on the following topics. First, market insights. Next evolving roles and expectations, common operational challenges, how CSC can help, and at the end a short Q&A.

Let's begin with a few market insights. Today corporate legal departments are facing a variety of challenges, most significantly the growing complexity of legal and compliance workloads, increased cybersecurity risks, and worker exhaustion and burnout. Additionally, larger workloads are being heaped onto already busy in-house legal teams, driving the need to gain efficiency through process improvement and technology solutions.

Other factors impacting legal and compliance work are 54% of lawyers say they've experienced some degree of exhaustion, and that a competitive talent market is preventing many legal departments from increasing headcount. Ultimate reason firms to invest in technology to manage workloads in a more cost-effective manner.

Now let's look at evolving roles and expectations for legal teams. Number one, cost-cutting pressure from company leadership remains high despite expanding workloads. In a 2021 survey from Ernst & Young, they found that 88% of GCs reported they plan to reduce the overall cost of legal functions over the next three years, with pressure from the board and CEO cited as the top reasons. This most often translates into current staff taking on multiple roles, including more technical roles, tasks to drive process efficiency through technology.

Number two, while cost control is still a priority, the most critical need is for legal leadership initiatives that enable growth and strategic risk mitigation. Therefore, simplifying matter and spend management and automating non-strategic tasks becomes more critical than ever.

Number three, managing regulatory uncertainty. This will continue to present a large need for organizations as local and national governments adjust regulations, making it more important than ever for compliance groups to manage their workload effectively through ELM technology.

Next we'll discuss the three most common operational challenges we see from customers when it comes to managing their matters and legal spend, and later how we address those challenges through CSC's ELM technology.

Number one, managing cases and documents across multiple practice groups without a single source of truth can result in disorganized data, business process issues, and reporting challenges. Number two, manual receipt routing and review of outside counsel invoices can be inefficient and labor intensive. Number three, excessive time is often spent monitoring the billing process, tracking payment status, and manually compiling accurate spend data.

Introducing CSC ELM. CSC ELM is an all-in-one solution combining service of process with matter and spend management to address the most common challenges facing legal departments looking to organize and automate their internal business processes. Now let's circle back to those three challenges mentioned in the previous slides.

Challenge one, managing cases and projects across multiple practice groups without a single source of truth. I know from experience talking with customers that many of you are still managing case data using spreadsheets. I also know that lots of teams are storing documents in file folders or in Outlook. Are your practice groups capturing meaningful data and are they sharing documents effectively? CSC ELM allows you to centrally manage cases, documents, and legal spend across your entire legal department. You'll improve communication, share data faster, and collaborate more easily.

We put a slide up earlier that spoke to the volume of requests coming into teams like yours. How much time do you spend managing legal intake and service of process documents? We can automate your legal intake and matter creation for incoming service of process to significantly save time for your team, giving them more bandwidth to manage more meaningful tasks.

Many of our customers tell us that one of their major pain points is getting information from colleagues in a timely manner, especially given that communication is primarily done via email. You simply can't always be the highest priority, and you aren't always responded to as quickly as you would like. With everyone capturing data in their own aging databases and on spreadsheets, how quickly is your team able to obtain case status disposition or matter assignment info across the department? By using standardized matter data across practice groups you can make reporting on case status and monitoring productivity a breeze.

One of CSC's biggest differentiators is that we partner with our clients to learn their business processes and become an extension of your legal department. Our implementation specialists remain available after go live and continue supporting you as your needs evolve. And this is not a one-size-fits-all approach. We build custom matter templates to support your unique data requirements, with workflow tools that can be tailored to your business processes.

Challenge number two, manual receipt, routing, and review of outside counsel invoices is inefficient and labor intensive. We know that many legal departments still rely on email for communicating with outside counsel. But we all know that communicating over email is slow, and you probably spend a good deal of time tracking down who has or has not submitted their invoices each month. CSC provides your vendors with a secure, centralized upload portal, and our ELM specialists manage both the invoice submission process and the technical support.

We know that your time is valuable, and there are only so many hours in a day. How much time do your attorneys want to spend manually reviewing invoices, scrutinizing billing rates, keeping track of rate increases, and trying to determine whether charges comply with your billing guidelines? The answer is as few as possible. Our system programmatically enforces invoice rules, custom billing guidelines, and vendor billing rates with automated validation tools, ensuring data accuracy and business process compliance, reducing time spent reviewing by more than 50%.

We know how inefficient routing invoices via email for approval can be and how long it can take to get an invoice fully approved and off to AP. We also know that some of you are still printing PDFs and walking them around for signature. While this may be great for your step count, it's extremely time consuming. You need a way to keep track of what has been sent, who has signed off, and whether you have all the approvers needed to send invoices to accounts payable. We can fully automate the invoice routing and review while enforcing compliance with your custom routing procedures, your process controls, and authority limits for quicker approvals, fewer rejections, and faster payments.

Once you've completed your part of the process, how much time does it take for invoices to be reviewed and processed by AP because they also need to manually review for approval time, people, and rate, and billing guideline compliance. Are they keying those invoices in by hand? If they are, you probably have an invoice backlog and are getting a lot of payment status questions from vendors. You may even be missing out on early pay discounts. We can integrate directly with your accounts payable system to slash time spent validating invoices and eliminate manual keying of invoice data.

Challenge number three, excessive time is spent monitoring the billing process, tracking payments status, and manually compiling accurate spend data. With non-standard, decentralized matter data and a manual invoice process, we know how time consuming it is to compile invoice status and spend data each and every month. CSC provides a real-time dashboard visualization for daily monitoring of your legal spend, billing process, and actionable items.

As invoice administrators, we know that constantly answering payment status questions from vendors and staff attorneys can be a major distraction and take you away from higher value work. Both administrators and staff attorneys will benefit from real-time visibility into the status of invoices moving through the approval process, who invoices are sitting with, for how long, and whether they're being reviewed and paid in a timely manner. Status data becomes readily available to everyone on your team.

When you are tasked with manually compiling data from multiple sources, we understand that most of your time is spent scrubbing and conforming that data to make it useful. We can give you that time back. We standardize and automate cost tracking by collecting and validating easily reportable matter, invoice, and line-item data at each step in the invoice life cycle. All pertinent spend data is captured and validated to ensure data integrity and compliance with your reporting requirements.

And finally, closing out the invoice life cycle from a data and tracking standpoint, our automated payment integrations ensure payment status always remain in sync with AP, ensuring transparency and accurate spend reporting for legal staff and administrators.

Here you can see our workflow and reporting tools keep you fully plugged into your billing process while eliminating most of the manual effort associated with managing outside counsel invoices, so you can spend more time on proactive tasks versus being stuck in perpetual reactive mode.

So support and pricing, just a quick overview of CSC ELM support and pricing. CSC uses tenured implementation, consulting, and support teams who can take a customized approach to each client. All support is managed in-house, and we become an extension of your legal team. Our annual cost is lower versus our competitors, and unlike our competitors we do not charge for implementation. This can be a substantial savings. Simple data conversions are also included. We only charge for complex data conversions that require significant development resources.