Representative Expertise with Legal Spend Management
Law departments are increasingly expected to function as a value center rather than a cost center for their greater organizations. Department leadership and legal operations managers face the continual challenge of delivering — either internally or through outside counsel or vendor partners — high quality management of their legal challenges at an efficient cost.
Consilio understands this challenge, and is equipped to help departments control both internal and external spend, from internal staffing models to optimizing outside counsel relationships. In addition to specific consultative engagements designed to define and optimize workflows, Consilio leverages technology, through our Sky Analytics platform, to deliver deep data insights on your department’s legal spend and provide comparative views with other similarly positioned organizations.
Legal Spend Analysis
Reduce legal spend by 10%-15% and improve service quality.
Law departments are increasingly expected to function as a business unit rather than a cost center. Department leadership and legal operations managers face the challenge of delivering high quality, complex legal services at an efficient cost. Consilio understands this challenge, and is equipped to help departments control both internal and external spend, from internal staffing models to optimizing outside counsel relationships.
Consilio’s services include evaluations of internal workload, outside counsel management, service delivery models, technology and business processes. From there, our expert team empowers you to:
- Rationalize and prioritize the services delivered to internal business partners.
- Develop a staffing model that allocates work between internal attorneys, non-legal staff and outside counsel and balances need, cost and risk.
- Optimize processes and address gaps through technology, tools and templates.
- Implement and managed the required changes across your department and organization.
The Consilio approach has helped teams reduce spend by 10% to 15% without compromising service quality.
External Spend Optimization
Create a customized road map to optimize external spend
Consilio’s External Spend Optimization service is specifically designed to deliver impactful results. We provide clients with insight into how to effectively reduce outside counsel cost and optimize the value provided. This fixed-cost engagement provides law departments with both strategies to maximize the value delivered by outside counsel and data to drive favorable rate and staffing model negotiations that do not put external counsel relationships at risk.
Clients provide us with their eBilling data, external counsel management guidelines and process documentation, key department metrics, and one day of key stakeholder interviews. We analyze billing data within Sky Analytics, and within in three to four weeks, clients receive:
- Spend Optimization Findings: analyzes your top ten firms and shows benchmark comparisons versus your peer set.
- Spend Optimization Recommendations: provides tailored recommendations for spend rationalization, savings expectations and potential changes to outside counsel guidelines and management process.
- Prioritized Action Plan: recommends steps to make progress and includes high-level effort, timeframe and resources acquired
Clients also receive the following resources across the year:. - Sky Analytics Hosted License: provides a one-year license to our analytics platform, preloaded with up to 24 months of your billing data and preconfigured push reports.
- Quarterly Progress Checkups: includes progress evaluation refreshes to Sky Analytics data and the prioritized action plan, as well as consultative guidance.
Clients who have implemented our tailored recommendations have reduced external spend and optimized the value received from their law firms.
Outside Counsel and Vendor Management
Implement a data-driven, outside counsel management program that contains costs and increases value
Consilio supports a comprehensive approach to outside counsel management, including defined processes and tools to support the entire matter lifecycle – from strategic firm selection to on-going engagement and annual performance evaluation. We understand that the quality of legal services and protecting the integrity of relationships with firms is of high importance and that law department needs are often not met through traditional procurement tactics.
Thus, we employ a value-based approach to designing outside counsel management programs– promoting disciplined processes and financial management–that can benefit both the law department and law firm.
Our team works with our clients to identify, design and implement the components of an effective outside counsel management program, including:
- Outside counsel management and billing policies
- Firm selection including RFPs and preferred provider panels
- Budgeting, AFAs and legal project management
- Spend analytics and operations
- Annual performance evaluation and negotiation process
By implementing a data-driven, outside counsel management program, our clients have realized significant cost savings and increased value from their law firm relationships.
Insights on Legal Spend Management