Legal spend management is a vital element of your law firm’s expense control and accounting structures. It includes benefits that grant you better spending visibility, cost control, and more.
This guide to legal spend management will explain what this important law firm structure is. It will also highlight the benefits of using a management platform for your legal spending and the best features to look for in such a platform.
What Is Legal Spend Management?
Legal spend management is a legal practice or discipline that provides firms and legal departments insight into their spending. In particular, a management structure gives firms over outside counsel spending. So, with this software, your firm can better know, understand, and designate outside legal spending.
Modern spend management structures are available to support this control over outside spending. This management process can function through diverse and effective legal software solutions without a hitch or hassles. The fundamental goal of these software systems is to improve funds allocation and spending through clear insights and data.
Using A Legal Spend Management Platform
Legal spend management software solutions are a worthwhile investment for law firms. These are the benefits and features your firm can take advantage of by using such a platform.
The Benefits
Here are the benefits of introducing a legal spend management platform to your accounting structures:
- Can significantly decrease legal spending.
- Analysis of outside defence firm performance based on various metrics like deposition costs, success rates, etc.
- Constant tracking of costs as matters progress, so cost analysis isn’t dependent on the invoice.
- Improves matter budget forecasting through updated tracking capabilities.
- Speeds up invoice management and processing.
- Enhances legal team productivity through the automation of repetitive manual tasks.
- Decreases pressures on the legal team from manually managing the invoicing process.
- Encourages informed and data-driven decision-making on matters and general firm budgets.
- Allows the firm to improve fund allocation to higher-return or higher-value projects.
- Gives a foundation for cost-reduction strategies and efforts.
- Provides notifications to necessary actors for changes to matter and spend data.
- Ensures all cost and spending data remains reliable and traceable.
- Increases the reliability, accuracy, and efficiency of spending data by removing human error.
- Ascertains compliance with internal and industry regulations and guidelines for billing, invoicing, accounting, etc.
These are some of the main reasons your firm should introduce a solid legal management structure. Of course, these benefits can feed into the greater functioning of the entire organisation. It can foster better teamwork and establish your firm as a trustworthy institution with sound financial structures to boot.
Features For A Good Legal Spend Tool
When selecting or searching for a good legal spend management tool for your organisation, prioritise these features:
- Automation
- Matter management
- Time tracking
- Billing and invoicing management
- Accounting
- Email correspondence
- Update tracking or monitoring
- Notifications and reminders
- Document control and centralisation
- Collaboration and communication channels
Amberlo – Comprehensive Legal Spend Control Suite
At Amberlo, we’ve developed a whole suite of legal software solutions that can support you on your management journey. Our software is tried and tested and built for effective use by legal firms of all sizes. We also provide exceptional support through software introduction and beyond, so you always have a helping hand.
Using Amberlo solutions will give you better control and visibility over the areas in the feature list above. Your legal team can communicate better about cost or spending, gain easy access to relevant documents on our cloud database, and track expenses as the matter progress.
Team members can also leave time-consuming and manual tasks, like data entry and time-tracking, to the software. As your lawyers focus on billable and skill-heavy tasks, these features encourage greater productivity and profit. You also develop a reliable and secure system for your spending monitoring and budget.
Conclusion
When firms contract outside legal defence support, spending management can get difficult to oversee. And with additional external parties, it may be harder to ensure the correct compliance with your firm’s invoicing and other spending guidelines.
Using legal spend management software helps you gain a handle on all outside legal defence costs and expenditures. It ensures that all parties in a matter remain on the same page about where the firm or legal department’s money is going. You can improve accountability, productivity, communication, and more through analytics, time tracking, document centralisation, and other features. So, contact us today for support in setting up a sound legal spending structure that can do all of this and more for your firm!
