Consulting for Corporate Law Departments
Practical advice and proven methods to do more with less.
Law Department Strategy
More innovative strategic planning, more effective cost management, and more objective measurement of progress against strategic goals.
Elevate helps GCs map the future and then chart a course to get there from the present. Collectively, the members of the Elevate team have helped over 80 corporations to design, implement and manage legal operations, including some of the most innovative and award-winning solutions in the legal industry. We bring this experience to bear in advising law department leaders on big-picture planning, including strategic goal-setting and priorities, operational innovation, technology strategy, and management information systems that ensure the ability to “measure what you manage.”
With assistance and guidance from Elevate, General Counsel can build best-in-class law departments with more forward-looking strategies.
Strategic and Technology Roadmaps
Horizon Planning
Legal Spend Strategy
Business Case Development for Strategic Initiatives
Management Information Systems
Legal Spend Management for Corporate Law Departments
Practical, proven strategies and methods to control legal costs and improve results.
Today’s economic environment has elevated the need to manage costs and optimize value. Spend management is now a strategic function unto itself, and it increasingly drives competitive advantage.
Nowhere is cost management more imperative than in the area of legal spend. To address the top priority for law departments, Elevate Services delivers thought-leading, innovative and technology-supported services to enable companies to manage and control legal costs.
Our tools and services enable companies to analyze past spending data, identifying trends and areas to save, as well as tracking and comparing current market rates. We help companies streamline internal engagement processes, build preferred provider lists or panels, and develop customized roadmaps for achieving their specific spend management goals. More importantly, Elevate’s proven methodologies reduce legal spend while maintaining overall quality and outcomes.
Our team of legal spend management experts are comprised of law department managers, legal sourcing directors and legal spend management consultants. This combination of expertise allows us to deliver more proven and innovative strategies that go beyond the conventional methods for reducing legal spend. In addition to delivering fundamental spend strategies focused on rate and staffing model alignment, our teams advise on a variety of approaches including competitive law firm engagement, value-based AFAs, unbundling of legal services, and methods for shifting work in-house.
The result: Elevate helps corporate law departments achieve significant savings while building increased overall value.
Legal Spend Strategy
Legal Spend Analytics and Benchmarking
Legal Invoice and Bill Review
Legal AFA Program and Playbooks
Legal Spend Technology Selection and Implementation
Legal RFP and Outside Counsel Management
Legal Process Outsourcing (LPO) Strategy and Advisory
Legal Operations
Improved planning and execution, more informed decisions through better operational metrics, and greater insight into choosing the best technology and resources for each task.
The Elevate Legal Operations consulting team has over 20 years of combined law department operations experience helping General Counsel and Law Department Operations Managers achieve operational success. We provide innovative, cost-effective solutions for reducing total legal spend, increasing legal staff efficiency and driving more favorable legal outcomes. We help law departments use technology and build information-driven operations that run smarter and do more with less.
Legal Spend Management
Legal Technology Selection and Implementation
Dashboards, Metrics and Intelligence
Technology Usage Assessments
Resourcing, Staffing and Right-sourcing
Legal Operations Training and Support
Elevate Support Services
In addition to providing operational consulting, Elevate’s global team also provides a full range of legal and other support services, including:
Document Review
Contract Management
Due Diligence
Legal Invoice Review
Medical Claims and Litigation
IP Support
Legal Technology and Systems
Selecting and implementing legal technology, coupled with process streamlining and best practices.
Evaluating, choosing and implementing legal technology for the corporate law department can be a challenge and a sizable investment. Elevate’s legal technology experts guide in-house legal teams through the process of selecting, converting, designing and implementing key legal technologies:
- Matter Management and eBilling
- Contract Management and eSignatures
- IP Management
- eDiscovery
Ecosystem Legal Management (ELM)
In addition to advising on legal technology selection, implementation and use, we also offer Ecosystem Legal Management echnology to help law departments work smarter and achieve better results.
Legal Technology Strategy and Roadmap Development
Gain a strong understanding and develop a vision of how specific legal technologies will support overall strategy, which may include use of legal spend management, document management, contract management, legal hold automation, e-discovery, GRC and reporting and intelligence.
Requirements Gathering
Define the capabilities that legal technology solutions must provide in order to support the business objectives for your law department.
System Selection
Choose the right legal technologies and providers that match both short- and long-term business requirements, ensuring best-fit, scalable solutions.
Implementation
Ensure the proper expertise, team structure, timeline and risk mitigation strategies for a smooth implementation that stays within budget.
System Usage Optimization
Not getting what you wanted from an already-implemented technology or the way it’s being used? Elevate can help diagnose design gaps and identify best practices to help get legal teams back on track, maximizing efficiencies and reducing legal spend.
Lean for Legal
Strategies, best practices and training that increase value to the business while reducing operational waste.
For many years, the Lean approach has helped the business world increase the value of its work product and streamline processes to reduce waste. Now, corporate law departments have begun to take advantage of the same Lean principles to do more with less and accelerate delivery without sacrificing quality. The result is a heightened focus on the value provided to – and perceived by – business peers and end users.
Lean provides proven, specific techniques that can be used to:
- Help diagnose the root causes of complex problems
- Quickly address issues with corrective actions through rapid improvement events
- Improve culture overall, fostering an environment of collaboration, engaged leadership, and empowered front-line staff
Elevate’s Lean team helps our customers learn, master, and apply Lean methodologies in the context of the legal world. We bring Lean best practices to wide range of areas, such as contract services, due diligence, litigation support, legal billing and legal operations.
Real-world examples of Lean improvements include:
- Removing bottlenecks, such as redesigning contract approval processes
- Reducing errors, such as tracking compliance data more accurately
- Reducing complexity, such as end-to-end improvement of M&A matter processing
- Updating systems, such as transitioning from paper to electronic signatures
- Increasing visibility, such as improving utilization reporting
- Removing waste, such as streamlining administrative support functions in legal
Lean Training for Leaders
Lean Training and Certification
Lean Business Canvas
Kaizen / Rapid Improvement Event
Lean Process Improvement Implementation
Lean Talent / Managed Services
Digital Strategy and Solutions
Consult-to-deploy services to help law departments and law firms envision new ways to capture and create value with technology.
Through a combination of strategic guidance, technical expertise, and our toolkit of highly configurable digital capabilities, Elevate Digital Strategy & Solutions (“DSS”) is the legal industry’s on-ramp for digital transformation. We provide consult-to-deploy services that help law departments and law firms envision new ways to capture and create value with technology, then help them realize that vision by designing fit-for-purpose software solutions based on digital technology.
Digital technology encompasses a broad set of capabilities, including artificial intelligence, natural language processing, machine learning, content analytics, predictive analytics, and blockchain. Elevate DSS has developed reusable software modules to help our customers turn insights into action that can be assembled in various combinations to reflect the unique business requirements, data, and workflows of law departments and law firms. Our modular approach to digital technology makes us fast, flexible, and cost-effective.
Elevate has assembled a team of legal technologists, engineers, and consultants who can design and build customized digital solutions that run the gamut from short-term digital expertise on-demand to broad digital transformations. Everything we do is underpinned by:
- Strategic guidance, customizable digital technology, and implementation services that can vitalize and transform business initiatives, and
- Elevate’s unique legal subject matter expertise combined with the technological know-how to address today’s challenges.
Consult-to-deploy services
Flexible software modules
Digital Strategy Development and Support
Process Improvement
Data Analysis
What Brian Kuhn from Elevate says:
Technology is disrupting the economics of the legal industry. Our whitepaper explores the market conditions that are driving digital transformation, explores what digital transformation means “beyond the buzzword,” and explains how law firms and law departments can achieve successful digital transformation with the right strategy.