Lawyer Monthly Magazine - August 2019 Edition

the product of ageing practice management systems – many of which are 25 years old. The fact is, in-house legal teams have never had any real clarity over their spending. The industry is stuck with inconsistent legal spend data, and it’s always been this way. Even today, legal teams use outdated, time-consuming and manual tools to track spending – using data that is months out of date. Sadly, this isn’t even surprising – and perhaps linked to a global problem. The 2018 Thomson Reuters Legal Tracker Legal Department Operations Index revealed that 93% of US corporate legal departments put controlling outside legal spend as a crucial area of focus. Although, only 13% of departments surveyed categorised their spend management sophistication as ‘optimised’. The Solution UK legal departments commission billions of pounds worth of external counsel every year. However, there are major concerns surrounding the management of this budget that have remained substantially unaddressed for decades. So, what’s the answer? It’s only now that firms are analysing large sums of legal spend data, and the broader financial aspects of running an in-house legal team, that the reality of the situation is becoming known. The advances we see in cloud computing and analytics capabilities make it possible to find valuable insights that address the issues of visibility and transparency, manage the intricacies of alternative fee arrangements and reveal the ongoing unintentional errors and behaviours that can lead to overcharging. These new platforms go beyond the ageing E-Billing tools of years past – enabling in-house teams to understand their longstanding spend data, as well as what’s happening in real time. In-house legal teams and their advisers sit on the solution – the very data that can help solve the industry’s financial management problems. By integratingwith law firmpractice management systems, new technology can reverse these issues and give legal teams real- time visibility and transparency of their spending. This will help to bring clarity, control and confidence to legal budgeting, meaning less time wasted, and more money saved – a win for businesses large and small. As these new technologies become more embedded within the legal sector, we’ll start to see far greater transparency on legal spending, this in turn will mean next to no spending errors thanks to an accountable system that physically shows you what is being spent where. Real-time insight will protect legal teams from nasty surprises three months down the line. This is quite simply what in-house legal teams need to do to restore faith and modernise, or they risk falling further behind every other industry using digital technology to improve business functionality. LM ABOUT APPERIO Apperio transforms how le- gal departments are run by bringing clarity, control and confidence to in-house legal teams. Apperio is a legal spend tracking and analytics platform that pro- vides complete certainty on legal spend in real-time. With Apperio’s tracking and analytics, legal teams and other departments can see exactly what has and will be spent on legal fees and measure the performance of external law firms and health of the legal depart- ment. Apperio plugs into law firms’ existing time record- ing systems to provide accurate and accessible information on up-to-date legal spend. The software is easy to implement, re- quiring no IT team, and ac- cessible across in-house teams. Apperio’s platform is in daily use by more than 50 in-house legal teams looking to run their depart- ments like a business. 19 AUG 2019 | WWW.LAWYER-MONTHLY.COM Special Feature Written By Apperio