Digital White Papers

I L T A W H I T E P A P E R | T E C H S O L U T I O N S 44 goes without saying that legal team tasks are not controlled by the SLAs.) Administrative time commitments typically take two days per stage, for a total elapsed time of two business weeks — one week for reviewing the proposed commitments and preparing negotiation points, and a second week of putting approved client commitments into effect. Apply technology Technolo can clearly enhance the business processes associated with the management of client commitments. The business goals are simple to understand, but challenging to accomplish: • Know what's been committed. • Comply with the commitments throughout the client lifecycle, i.e., as they are renewed or updated, or when evolving firm policies necessitate a change. • Analyze trends by client industry, nature of the work, and administrative team. Technolo can help. The first step is to establish all-inclusive repository of active client agreements. To facilitate access, analysis, compliance, and reporting, materials must be categorized consistently, e.g., by subject matter, commitment type, corporate family, or financial grouping. Next, the firm must publish the executed engagement terms so legal team members know what's needed to comply. Publishing can take several paths. The simplest option is for the key terms to be summarized in a "rules of engagement" email that is sent to legal team members as they join the engagement. More robust options, which require more technolo and centralized maintenance, include: • Filing the terms in a document management system in a client workspace, which requires that placement of materials in the workspace be tightly controlled (i.e., verified, executed terms) and in a view- only format. • Publishing a summary of the executed terms on client pages on the firm's intranet. It's likely the firm's document management system and intranet are already governed by ethical and confidential wall security — a clear benefit of these last two options. With appropriate technolo, firms can configure workflows that support a distributed review and approval process. Software can apply automated rules to ensure essential terms are present in the document and have not been modified. Engagement terms can be integrated with other firmwide client-management systems including: • Timekeeping — from simply making timekeeping requirements available at the point of time entry to notifying timekeepers that a time entry violates a client requirement (such as prohibited block billing) or even preventing a time entry from being released. • Intake workflow — from presenting an existing client's key engagement terms in a new business intake work form to answering work form questions based on these terms. • Conflicts — automatically importing

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