Hi PERSUIT,
Our PERSUIT team has worked with hundreds of in-house legal teams at some of the biggest companies in the world.
Having learned from many of their mistakes — and plenty of our own — we’ve developed a strong viewpoint about the order in which in-house teams should tackle their legal ops challenges.
Here’s our take. And what I think we’ve had wrong — until now.
Many in-house teams focus first on invoicing, e-billing, matter management, and other steps that happen later in the outside counsel management process. But our team’s take has long been that the best approach is to focus first on matter inception and sourcing.
Why matter inception over something like e-billing?
It’s what you do during matter inception — the steps you take at the beginning of a matter — that dictates what you pay at the end.
E-billing can’t help you claw back rates and scopes of work that were inflated from the outset.
Sure, you can use your new e-billing system to save 3-5% of spend on matters for which you were already overpaying your firms by 25%+.
Yet why not just save that 25% (or more) from the start? Not to mention that savings at matter inception result in a much quicker demonstration of ROI over e-billing.
But after speaking with Moderna CLO Shannon Thyme Klinger during our webinar last month, I realized that our thinking here has been wrong in one important respect.
Matter inception is the best place to start. But not because of total ROI, speed to ROI, or anything else that has to do with legal spend.
As Shannon explained to our audience during the webinar, she brought PERSUIT on board early in her tenure at Novartis, and then again at Moderna, not because of the savings (although at the time, I was mistakenly smug that’s what I had sold her on 🤷♂️ ).
She wanted the data. 📊
Here’s how Shannon explained what happened next for her team after they brought PERSUIT on board and went all in on their focus on matter inception.
"Obviously we saw the savings, but we started to see data in terms of which firms were spending how much time on similar matters and certain kinds of tasks.
"We started to become much more savvy as a legal department about the value of the work we were getting.
"In addition to being able to go back and understand at the time of an RFP if three firms bid on our RFP, I also had all of the data of what they thought was going to happen in a case and their strategic recommendations."
As a matter concluded, Shannon’s team could then go back and interrogate that data within the system.
✔️ Did what happened at the end of a matter match what the engaged firm said was going to happen?
✔️ In roughly the way they thought it was going to happen?
✔️ And if not, did one of the other firms identify the outcome in a different way?
✔️ And how does that knowledge enable us to make even better decisions as in-house legal departments to engage our law firms to drive better outcomes for our company and stakeholders?
The truth is that GCs don’t really care about cost savings. What they care about is delivering the right outcomes for the business.
Starting with matter inception helps GCs like Shannon Klinger do that more effectively and quickly than other legal ops solutions — like e-billing — that are myopically focused on invoicing.
If you want to drive better outcomes, you’ve got to have a way to make better decisions as an in-house legal department about how your firms are helping you do that.
And you can’t do that until you’ve got the right data.
Cheers,
Jim
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