The success of Enterprise Legal Management (ELM) for Legal Ops lies squarely on selecting the right technology – one that’s easily adopted and cost-effective. A good ELM strategy and platform, in turn, delivers better and more productive business practices which impact the entire enterprise.
How? The legal department is increasingly partnering with other departments, and extending ELM to embed legal best practices in their processes and operations. So the right ELM solution can provide your entire organization unprecedented agility and value.
Who are Legal's Strategic Corporate Partners?
Everyone in an organization should be interested in what industry peers are doing, short-term and long-term ROI, and why Legal Ops has specialized requirements to manage to an ELM strategy.
It’s the duty of Legal Ops to be able to answer the questions from non-Legal stakeholders and demonstrate the value of ELM adoption. What these stakeholders care about is often key to building an effective technology strategy and approach that satisfies the entire business, and not just the Legal department.
PROCUREMENT
“New software and projects are consistently coming into our team through RFP. We have highly specific rules for our organization about selecting and on-boarding vendors. Ultimately, we want to pick the best software and partner with a long-term vendor while saving money and complexity for our company.”
Procurement’s questions?
- Why does the legal team need its own technology?
- Why would we want to introduce a new vendor?
- Does this meet all criteria of our buying process and the scope I’ve received?
- What timeline can we see on ROI if we go with this solution?
- Is there anything else on the table I can negotiate, products and services?
- Are our industry peers purchasing/seeing value here?
FINANCE
“We have very specific budgets and reporting requirements our department and company is driving toward each year. We have a company mandate to review and limit overhead due to outside counsel costs and Legal Operations is taking on this challenge. It’s my job in Finance to make sure that the proposed solution works, is compliant with all corporate policies and procedures, and is a reliable long-term investment.”
Finance’s questions?
- How will legal invoicing processes align with corporate requirements?
- How do we ensure E2E tax, GL, accrual, budget compliance?
- How will we ensure end-to-end SOX controls and compliance?
- How will the technology help align legal billing team with finance teams/requirements?
- How do we make legal spend more predictable?
- What is the ROI at 1, 2, and 5 years?
IT
“We keep the lights on for all our IT projects and make sure these get delivered on-time and within budget. The team works to provide intrinsic value to our internal projects while simplifying the technology landscape we have and minimizing issues, downtime, and costs.”
IT’s questions?
- How much work will my team be responsible for once implemented?
- How will this integrate with our current technology?
- Who will be responsible for system integrations?
- What other vendors are we reviewing?
- Does this software map to our security protocols?
- What’s the timeline for implementation?
Hyperion Global Partners partnered with Mitratech to develop the first-of-its-kind Legal Buyer’s Guide for the Rest of Us to help address both the challenges and opportunities of working with and supporting Law Departments everywhere.
