Effective Management of Outside Counsel: Tools of the Trade

To effectively manage millions of dollars in annual outside counsel legal spending, today’s well-run law department must learn how to capitalize on state-of-the-art technology as a means to mine critical data and drive efficiencies. The technology must be used for both the processing and the management of vast numbers of invoices, as well as for drilling into the data that can be derived from such invoices. What can we learn from the data that might influence thinking or behavior? The law department must know how to mine the data that it is collecting and facilitate real-time management of its legal spending and strategic relationships with outside counsel. The Prudential Financial law department is an example of a department that understands the data mining and real-time management concepts. They have acted and they have turned these concepts into a functioning legal management performance dashboard.

Prudential Financial’s law department has been able to use technology to gather various sources of data throughout the organization to: