Driving Legal Transformation and Efficiency for a Global Manufacturer
Our professionals assisted a European-headquartered global manufacturer in achieving €11M in savings through a legal technology overhaul, demonstrating the transformational impact of strategic technology implementation. Our professionals helped the client and its legal department achieve remarkable savings and enhance operational efficiency by focusing on automation, centralization, and integration.
Organization Profile
The organization is a leader in its industry, known for its commitment to operational excellence and innovation. Seeking to enhance its legal maturity and gain savings through legal technology infrastructure, it aimed to drive efficiency and cost control across its global operations.
Challenge
The organization’s legal department faced several significant challenges:
- Market Challenges: Several large-scale global government investigations
- Business Demand: Business growth was stretching all resources, including legal
- Organizational Challenges: Significant restructuring across the organization, including legal and compliance
- Budgetary Pressure: Lower baseline budget and 3-year savings requested by CFO
Solution
To address these challenges, our professionals developed and implemented a comprehensive plan to gain savings through legal technology. This roadmap was approved by the CLO and CFO, focusing on three key areas:
- Matter Management: Introduced a centralized matter management system to track and manage all legal matters, enhancing visibility, collaboration, and regulatory compliance.
- Management Reporting and Dashboards: Our professionals implemented a periodic reporting process by leveraging matter management technology. In addition, they created management reports to escalate and highlight matter progress, matter spending, key dates, etc.
- E-billing: Implemented an advanced e-billing solution integrated with existing Accounts Payable systems to automate invoicing processes, improve billing accuracy, and provide real-time financial insights. Our professionals also helped create the outside counsel and e-billing guidelines to be deployed along with the new system. Our professionals also helped launch the *new* engagement letters to standardize legal services and provide engagement globally.
Results
The strategic legal technology initiatives yielded significant benefits for the organization, including:
- €11M in Savings: Achieved through increased operational efficiency, reduced manual labor, and improved financial management.
- Enhanced Efficiency: Simplified workflows to capture information in one go and then make it available for different levels of reporting and decision-making. Reduced email back and forth as the matter management system served as the single standard repository of truth. Saved several hours a week for each legal staff by eliminating manual, duplicative, and mundane work that can now be repurposed for substantive legal work.
- Transparency: The technology helped the global team communicate up-to-date information and allowed better collaboration on complex commercial and investigation assignments.
- Improved Financial Management: The e-billing system, standardized billing guidelines, and engagement letters allowed for better financial oversight and control. The key savings came from improved spend management at all staff levels.
This success story underscores our professional’s commitment to delivering tailored solutions that drive measurable results. It demonstrates how strategic technology selection and implementation can lead to substantial savings and operational excellence.
Services Leveraged:
- Outside Counsel Guidelines
- Engagement Letter Frameworks
- Legal Technology Roadmap
- Legal Technology System Selection
- Process and Technology Design
- Project Management / PMaaS
- Matter Management / Enterprise Legal Management
- E-Billing
