As all legal departments face pressure to be more efficient with fewer resources, legal operations can offer relief when it comes to managing costs. Christine Coats, vice president of legal operations at Oracle Corp., offered Corporate Counsel tips on how an ops team can cut spend, in some cases by millions of dollars.

“Your legal team is always asked to do more with less,” said Coats, who joined Oracle in 2015 and is also part of the executive leadership team at the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium, an organization with legal ops leaders as members who aim to optimize legal services delivery models and share knowledge. And whether the mandate is to reduce spending or head count, she said, a legal ops team focused on, for instance, process improvements, cost management of outside counsel and department budget can help tremendously.

As an example, Coats pointed to the cost savings departments can achieve by focusing on e-billing, where typically “you're going to get the biggest bang for the buck,” she said.

“Every time you look at something and you measure it, you should automatically be able to save 10 percent, whether it's 10 percent of the time [or] 10 percent of the total dollar amount,” according to Coats. Hypothetically, she said, “if you're spending $100 million in your legal department and your outside counsel is half of that, which typically it usually is 40-60 percent … you should be able to save 10 percent easily.”

She also cited preferred firm consolidation, “where you actually talk to your outside firms and you get that partnership with them,” Coats said. “So you actually say, 'I've been looking at the rates, I've been looking at the discounting structure, now how can we be better partners with each other?'”

Coats suggested focusing on accrual automation and matter management as well. On the latter, she said: “Your top vice presidents and your GC want to always have that information at their finger tips, with the status of the matter, how's it going, what's the cost, the budget.” Having that rolled into one solution, she said, “just makes everything more efficient for the legal team.”

Then there is what Coats called “soft cost savings,” such as ensuring there's a focus on diversity, not just for the in-house legal department, but also with outside counsel.

“Diversity brings employee productivity and engagement. You get a diverse talent pool, it also helps with employee retention, and it also helps with our public image and branding,” Coats said. “All of these things are good things for the department and [that] makes the department run more efficiently and [makes it] more creative and more innovative and ultimately saves cost.”

The amount saved will vary from legal department to legal department, depending on the size of the company, Coats said, but “when you roll all of it together, that [can be] millions of dollars.”

Contact Jennifer Williams-Alvarez at [email protected].