The Best Enterprise Legal Management Software Solutions for an Enhanced Management of Legal Operations

Enterprise legal management software helps businesses manage their legal spending effectively. They also aid organizations polish their legal functions and comply with project deadlines.

However, these are not the only benefits. There’s much more in store!

Better efficiency

Everything that a legal department works on goes through the enterprise legal management software, which acts as the go-to source for everyone who works in the department.

This eliminates inaccuracies and discrepancies, and the entire department gets reliable views or suggestions on varied matters.

As a result, legal functions can be carried out quickly and without errors, which directly feeds into increasing efficiency.

Improved collaboration

No legal department works alone. They need to collaborate with teams within the department and other divisions. When there is a system, everyone can understand what happens and get a unified view on legal matters.

As a result, various external and internal parties can contribute to legal matters and work hand-in-hand to ensure a smooth workflow without much muddling.

Cost reduction

With an ELM solution, businesses can analyze various aspects of their operations in which costing is one of the most important ones. Companies can quickly identify areas where costs can be cut down and improvised with the help of an ELM-backed cost analysis.

As the system maintains all documents under the same umbrella, which in turn saves them from spending time on browsing through.

The software solution also helps schedule a variety of activities, like contract renewal and subscription payment, which can further bring down penalties and late fees.

An ELM system helps the legal department carry out all its major functions with efficiency and quality compliance.

Here is how legal departments can leverage enterprise legal management software:

Legal spend management

Using sturdy legal management systems, businesses can effectively trace, analyze, and optimize their costs for internal activities as well as external counsels.

A corporate legal system enables the legal department to:

• Efficiently carry out e-billing
• Review and approve invoices
• Conduct audits with the help of artificial intelligence
• Select, manage, and pay external vendors
• Comply with diversity and inclusion goals

Overseeing legal matters

An ELM solution also helps the legal department assess the status of the inventory and legal matters from time to time.

With the aid of an ELM solution, legal departments can:

• Manage the budget, finance, and collaborations of all activities related to legal matters and choose firms and external counsels as needed.
• Oversee the completion of legal matters right from the beginning through implementation and closing.
• Ensure comprehensive management of everything related to legal matters, such as budgeting, spending, performance assessment, data analysis, etc., based on departments, firms, teams, and individuals.

Managing contract cycles

Businesses often enter into a range of contracts, and they need to be maintained and renewed as their expiry comes up. There needs to be a proactive approach by legal departments in managing their contracts as well as update the clauses if necessary.

Apart from this, corporate legal management systems also help with:

• Storing contract documents, developing and maintaining contract templates, documents, etc.
• Document analysis and insights generation, which is powered by artificial intelligence.
• Full-scale implementation of contracts from initiation, drafting, review, and revision to approval, e-signature, and storage.

Performance assessment and reporting

ELM solutions also play a crucial role in helping businesses examine various key performance indexes of their legal teams to improve performance.

A legal management solution can assist businesses in:

• Geting easy access to report templates, dashboards, performance metrics, visualizations, etc., for better performance analysis and reporting.
• Combining legal data with other business management tools and platforms using APIs or tools like MS Excel for comprehensive data visualization and reports.

Conducting legal analytics

Enterporise legal management software solution also helps businesses carry out timely and extensive legal analytics. They can use the insights and intelligence inferred from analytics to make better decisions.

With the help of a legal management system, businesses get to:

• Analyze budget, spending, and result trends to determine the most cost-effective action plans.
• Understand areas that need improvement in terms of quality, efficiency, and cost optimization.
• Carry out performance comparisons between internal teams and external competition to design better legal operational strategies.

Intellectual property management

In today's technology-driven world, it is easier for parties to steal and monetize proprietary data and digital assets of organizations. However, with the help of the best ELM software, organizations can thwart such malicious efforts of third parties constructively.

Leveraging the use cases of a legal management system, businesses can:

• Manage, safeguard, and defend the intellectual properties from unauthorized access and monetization.
• Ensure effective licensing and royalty management.
• Protect business ideas, ensuring protection against corporate espionage, and timely prosecution of copyright and trademark infringements.

Statutory compliance and risk management

ELM software can also help businesses ensure compliance with legal requirements according to industry, local, and national legal requirements.

Having an efficient legal management solution can help businesses in:

• Adhering to social, governance, environmental, and privacy compliances as needed in their market of operation.
• Ensuring compliance with employee welfare, safety, and training requirements.

If you are looking for well-built oftware to manage legal department operations and functions, consider the following features:

• Spend management
• Payment management
• Statutory compliance
• Client portal and management
• Portfolio descriptions
• Document management
• Document archiving
• Third-party integrations
• Contract cycle management
• Document assembly
• Legal data analytics

Choosing the best ELM software can be a daunting task, especially when it is an important component of managing your legal department. So what can you do to select the best solution that meets your goals?

Here is what you can do:

Consider the scope of your requirements

The best enterprise legal management software is the one that meets all your requirements. So before you start searching for an ELM system, understand your requirements. Consider what you want to improve and how you want to do it.

Once you know where you are falling behind now and what you need to work on, you can list your expectations from the software.

As per that list, you can start searching for the software, which will lead you to the most suitable one for your business.

Define a budget for the ELM software

The next thing you need to consider is your budget. How much can you spend, and how higher can you go with the pricing? You need to set realistic expectations with the pricing and budgeting.

When you have set your budget and established a pricing range you are comfortable with, you can consider the software solutions that fall within your budget range.

It helps you save a lot of time as you need to consider only those options that fall within this range. You can also consider solutions that offer a free trial, such Clio.com, Practicepanther.com, Amberlo.io, etc., to see how they work for you.

Consider the scalability of the system

As a business, you want to grow. Everything you do is in the hopes that you are going to grow gradually. Hence, while selecting an ELM system, make sure that it can scale up as your business grows.

If you fail to do this, it will be hard for the software to live up to your mounting requirements, which can make it challenging for your business in the long run. And it would be even more cumbersome to migrate to another ELM tool.

Therefore, when you are considering the software, look for such solutions that can accommodate your future needs, as well.

Assess the customer service of the brand

You don't know when you need help with your enterprise legal management solution. Therefore, you need to ensure that the customer service of the tools you choose is timely and available when you need them.

Conduct research on the internet to learn about the general consensus about customer service.

Try to understand how prompt and professional the customer service team is. Do they help you on time? How long do they usually take with billing issues? What's the average time they take to solve technical issues?

Going with a system that offers priority support 24x7 is the best choice.

Ensure the ELM system is secure

You are going to store a lot of potentially sensitive and private information about your clients, cases, and litigation details on your software. The security of the documents and the data on your system is a huge responsibility that falls on your business. Therefore, the tool needs to be super-secure, and you need to ensure it when choosing your tool.

Look at the technologies and security systems they use within the tool. How do they help you control the access? What happens if there is a breach?

Get concrete answers from the onboarding team before you commit to the corporate legal software.

Request for a demo of the software

The last thing you need to do before buying the tool is to have a live demo of the software. Most of the ELM systems provide a demo to their clients, and you must ask them for it as well.

It can help you better understand the process and the system's performance. This is where you can test the software before you subscribe to one of their paid plans.

The users of enterprise legal management solutions can be put into two categories:

Attorneys or lawyers

As attorneys are directly involved in the legal matters of businesses and their own clients, they extensively use enterprise legal management software solutions. The software helps them track billing hours, manage litigation documents, check their schedule, etc.

Lawyers can also leverage enterprise legal management solutions to collaborate and work with external agencies, streamline their communication, and share documents.

Legal business staff

An ELM solution is the best way to automate repetitive tasks that legal staff need do on a daily basis. The software enables users to automate workflows and system rules for certain functions.

Doing so can help legal staff to free their time up and use it for more productive and value-adding activities.

While we have discussed the advantages of using ELS systems for a business, they are not without challenges.

Here are a few challenges you might encounter while adopting ELM systems for your business.

Adopting corporate legal software

Adopting a software product and using the same for managing daily legal operations can be challenging for businesses and employees. You can manage this challenge by preparing the team and your business for adoption.

Training lawyers and legal staff

Another challenge is training the lawyers and legal staff to use the software to its full potential. For this, you need to create a thorough training program for everyone in such a way that the training does not interfere with your daily operations.

Integrating ELM systems

Another challenge you may face is integrating enterprise legal management systems into your other business management and communication systems. Most ELM software providers would help you with the migration. Prepare your business and operations for the integration in advance so that your operations are not entirely interrupted.

Migration to new enterprise legal management system

If you are moving from one ELM software to another system, migration can be a challenge and might interfere with your dregular legal operations. So create a migration strategy with your new ELM software provider and carry the process out with their help.

While these are a few challenges that you might face, these are in no way unmanageable. And the benefits the software brings outweigh the drawbacks. Therefore, when you consider setting up a corporate legal solution for your business, include strategies to manage these early hiccups.

Once these issues are examined and resolved from the beginning, you are good for smoother sailing.

Apart from ELM software solutions, there is a wide range of software applications you can use to meet the needs of your legal firm.

They are as given below:

Legal billing software

As you would have guessed, legal billing software enables businesses and law practitioners to manage their billing processes. It ranges from tracking billing hours and subscriptions of clients to sending invoices, receiving payments, tracking dues, and managing collections.

There are also billing systems that help businesses manage taxation.

An excellent legal billing software solution can improve the efficiency of your business' billing process and ensure you are paid on time.

Legal case management software

Having an effective and reliable software system to manage cases is crucial for any legal business. That's what legal case management software does. It helps you update the status of your cases, collect and store documents, plan litigation, and make notes.

With the help of a legal case management solution, you will never miss a case date or crucial updates.

With the right tools to help, you can always manage your cases and clients hassle-free, always,

E-discovery software

In a lawsuit, supportive documents play a huge role as evidence. With the help of an e-discovery software solution, you can streamline the process of collecting, processing, assessing, tagging, and presenting electronic documents during litigations.

Attorneys and legal businesses must use tools that help them quickly find relevant information and present it effortlessly. An ideal solution must also be quick, easy to use, and cost-effective.

With the help of a reliable e-discovery solution, you can expedite resolutions and alleviate litigation risks.

Litigation management software

Litigation software is a solution that helps legal businesses, in-house legal teams, attorneys, etc., track and manage their litigation from diverse jurisdictions successfully.

It also helps them organize their daily litigation activities and related information, such as the case description, court details, parties involved, and key details and notes.

Regardless of the size of the business, litigation management software can be used by every law firm to improve the efficiency of their litigation process and productivity.

Adopting an ELM system could yield massive ROI for your business. Hence, this needs to be done after extensive and careful consideration. The best thing you can do to take advantage of the solution to its full potential is to create an ELM strategy for your business.

The strategy will help you govern and regulate the adoption, implementation, and integration of the tool. The strategy must also have adequate room for contingencies and challenges. Once the strategy is set, you will always have an ELM master guide to rely on when challenges arise.

For an organization that wants to improve the performance of its legal team, an ELM system is definitely a savior. Intelligently integrating it into your business as per its unique needs is what makes it successful.