Why is it that corporates will manage their vendors with the latest technology, but don’t invest in corporate legal software to manage professional legal services? Enterprise Legal Management (ELM) is crucial to effectively manage legal service providers and making use of ELM software is the smart money investment. Corporate legal departments and high volume users of legal services are being urged to cut back and do more with less, with corporate leaders demanding efficiency gains and immediate cost cutting.

How are these corporate legal decisions being made in C suites around the globe? Legal department strategy is being decided with little real time information and valuable (and expensive) legal resources are being forced to cope with and do low-value work such as fill in spreadsheets to track their time, and report to internal departments and management. Strategic decisions such as insource versus outsource are seldom based upon measurable KPI’s and quality scores, but based upon a collective feeling or desire to handle that work internally. Decisions on the make-up of external legal panels are made so much more difficult when the desired information on performance, value, quality and costs don’t exist.

The are several anecdotal and formalised reports that Corporate legal departments are handling more work in-house and using less external counsel, but still remain unable to measure efficiency or decreased costs. The (in) ability to define external legal panel and new panel models, as well as automating reporting and legal bill audits, not to mention compliance and risk management, will be determined by the sophistication of the corporate legal or ELM software being used. Many large corporate legal teams are still operating with manual systems, wasting valuable resources and time.

LSG’s ELM software, Advocator System® can be used by corporate legal teams and insurers/TPA’s, fully configured to their organisational requirements. It measures and reports on all data captured – the more you put in the more you can measure: Using ELM software you can:-

• Understand how legal services is used in your business
• Track quality, performance and budgets/cost
• Understand internal and external behaviour
• Save time and money tracking and reporting on legal – Advocator System® automates this
• Check the legal bills for correctness and adherence to the agreed billing guidelines – this is automated in LSG’s system
• Automate the billing dispute process – save on legal costs
• Gain transparency across the globe of both internal and external users
• Have your valuable resources doing high value work only thereby increasing efficiency

Brad Tait has over 30 years of Australian and international experience in the financial services sector. He possesses expert knowledge in commercial insurance, commercial claims and underwriting, credit and risk management. With a driven inner passion for delivering customer success he applies significant experience in business process design from both a systems and people perspective.

Prior to joining LSG, Brad worked with Suncorp Group as a product Manager where he managed claims of 161 NSW Government Agencies with a staff of 90. In the past he was also engaged with JLT Australia as NSW State Claims Manager.