The modern General Counsel is equal parts lawyer and business executive, striving to manage the law department in ways that create value and strategic advantage for the company instead of operating primarily as a cost center. This poses a serious challenge for most GCs however, as many have only enough time and energy to focus on short- to mid-range planning.

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.

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 legal 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 legal departments achieve significant savings while building increased overall value.

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

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 clients 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