SimpleLegal Blog
In-House Counsel
Industry Trends
End of the Year Legal Conferences for In-House Counsel (2019)
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In-House Counsel
Sourcing Legal Services: More Isn’t Always Merrier
Many in-house legal departments don’t like change and feel comfortable maintaining the status quo, especially when it comes to their law firms. I mean, why fix something if it isn’t broken, r...
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In-House Counsel
The Era of Digital Transformation and Its Impact on Legal
Automation, digitization, cloud capabilities, artificial intelligence – these themes are all top of mind, tip of tongue, across C-suites. It all started with the device in your pocket, your sma...
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In-House Counsel
Feature Interview: Legal Operations within the Law Firm with Jerry Wyckoff
We’re sitting down with legal professionals to learn more about their roles and responsibilities, uncover useful insights and best practices, and discuss their views on the future of legal and ...
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In-House Counsel
5 Key Metrics for Productive Vendor Conversations
Data continues to play an increasingly important role for in-house legal teams, most notably allowing general counsel and chief legal officers (CLOs) to speak the language of data – to quantify...
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Legal Operations
The 2 Biggest Corporate Legal Investments of 2019
General counsel who traditionally reigned over risk, ethics, and compliance are now being asked to think about budget, technology, and operational efficiency. A handful of studies demonstrate the...
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In-House Counsel
3 Quick Tips for Getting Started with Legal KM
A successful legal knowledge management (KM) program increases legal department productivity, eliminates time spent doing duplicate work, and delivers consistency by leveraging intellectual and k...
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In-House Counsel
5 Things I Learned at the Digital Transformation in Corporate Legal Roundtable
Last week, we partnered with Morae Global to host a panel discussion on the digital transformation currently taking shape within corporate legal departments across the world. Starting bright and ...
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In-House Counsel
4 Tips to Move from GC to COO
We recently had the pleasure of speaking to Dan Wright, who shared his path of being the first in-house legal hire at AppDynamics – serving as their General Counsel – to taking on a more stra...
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In-House Counsel
5 Valuable Insights from Evolve the Law’s Legal Tech Roundtable
I just had the pleasure of attending the Evolve the Law ‘Emerging Legal Departments: Legal Tech 101 Roundtable’ in Sunnyvale where Bay Area legal departments networked over breakfast and part...
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In-House Counsel
Webinar Recap: Best Practices for Selling the Investment in Legal Technology Internally
We just wrapped up our ‘Best Practices for Selling the Investment in Legal Technology Internally’ webinar – what a great discussion! If you couldn’t make the webinar, we wanted to summari...
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In-House Counsel
6 Upcoming Legal Events You Don’t Want to Miss
What better way to expand your knowledge around legal operations than from your peers who have been there and done that? We’re sharing five upcoming events – both online and in-person – tha...
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In-House Counsel
4 Things You Can Do to Get the Most from Outside Counsel
Maximizing outside counsel performance is part trial and error and part effective management. Whether you are just starting with law firms or have dozens (if not hundreds) of vendors, here are fo...
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In-House Counsel
How to Talk to Your GC about Investing in Legal Operations Technology
Some legal professionals may feel apprehensive when approaching their GC or Chief Legal Officer (CLO) with requests to fund new legal operations technology. But, with a solid case in hand and an ...
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SimpleLegal Updates
Key Insights General Counsel and Legal Operations Have With SimpleLegal — And You Need
Data is only as good as the insights you get out of it. Thanks to the widespread availability of software, extracting value from the massive amounts of data received by the legal department (spec...
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In-House Counsel
5 Building Blocks Critical to Every Change Management Plan
We face changes all the time in our lives. At the workplace, it may be in the form of a new transformation initiative, a global system deployment, or even just moving offices. These changes are i...
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In-House Counsel
The Intelligent Way to Manage, Automate, and Control Your Invoice Process
Developing billing guidelines is an important step towards ensuring your department is fiscally responsible and that unique business processes are being followed both internally and externally. Y...
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In-House Counsel
Matter Management vs. Case Management
Matter Management (also referred to as Legal Matter Management) is the process in which matters and related data such as type of legal work, attorneys on the case, budgets, and invoices are gathe...
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In-House Counsel
Law Firm Diversity Programs: How to Track the Diversity of Your Outside Counsel
Corporate legal departments are placing significant weight on their law firms’ commitment to provide a diverse staff to perform legal services across all practice areas. In fact, more than a th...
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In-House Counsel
3 Reasons Your Legal Department Needs Matter Templates
As many legal teams know, creating legal matters can be a time-consuming process and a source of constant frustration. If you don’t have legal tech in place to facilitate matter creation, you...
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Legal Operations
3 Benefits of Enforcing Your Billing Guidelines with Legal Tech
The billing process naturally introduces tension between in-house legal teams and law firms. Surprise fees that lack justification, unauthorized charges, invoices submitted weeks or months after ...
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Legal Operations
Feature Interview: Global Legal Department Operations with Pierre Landy
We’re sitting down with legal professionals to learn more about their roles and responsibilities, uncover useful insights and best practices, and discuss their view on the future and evolution ...
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In-House Counsel
Feature Interview: Extracting the Most Value from Legal Tech with Nicole Mason
We’re sitting down with legal professionals to learn more about their roles and responsibilities, uncover useful insights and best practices, and discuss their view on the future of legal and l...
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In-House Counsel
Empowered General Counsel Position Their Departments as High Performing Business Units
General counsel have always acted as the protectors of their organizations, providing legal advice to ensure that their company is acting in accordance with the law. However, today’s volatile a...
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In-House Counsel
The Basics of Billing Guidelines
This post was updated on May 17, 2018 Corporate legal departments are shifting their thinking. No longer are law firms “just vendors”, but strategic partners who provide their expertise to he...
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Legal Operations
4 Quick Tips to Improve Your Legal Billing Guidelines
Legal billing guidelines, also known as outside counsel billing guidelines, are a great way for legal departments to communicate their expectations of their law firms and vendors. However, withou...
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In-House Counsel
Measuring AFA Effectiveness Part II: Leveraging Historical Data
A couple weeks ago, we published the first post in this series which focused on the intangible benefits of alternative fee arrangements (AFAs). Today’s post will highlight the process for deter...
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Legal Tech
What is a LEDES File and Why Should Legal Teams Care?
Have you ever heard the words LEDES file mentioned, and think to yourself what is that? Don’t worry, you’re not the only one! In this post, we’re sharing what a LEDES file is, and how it he...
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In-House Counsel
Measuring AFA Effectiveness Part I: How to Account for the “Intangibles”
It’s been roughly ten years since best-selling author, Scott Turow, penned the cover story for the American Bar Association journal titled, ‘The Billable Hour Must Die.’ During this time Tu...
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In-House Counsel
3 Tips for Getting Your Law Firms to Participate in Accrual Estimates
Legal accruals and how to manage them is a common topic brought up in conversations with our customers. On our blog, we’ve shared a brief introduction to accruals management and have discussed ...
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In-House Counsel
Standardize the Invoice Process & Reduce the Claims Lifecycle
[Case Study]Litigation costs are some of the most challenging spend categories for an insurer to manage. Both the legal and claims departments must work together to strike the right balance of cost containme...
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Legal Operations
A Brief Introduction to Legal Accruals Management
Many in-house legal teams are familiar with accruals, also known as unbilled estimates or the amounts that law firms estimate for work in progress. Unfortunately, unbilled estimates are difficult...
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In-House Counsel
4 Tools Your In-House Legal Team Needs
*This article originally appeared on The Recorder Adopting technology is becoming more commonplace in legal. But, with a growing number of tools promising increased operational efficiency and red...
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In-House Counsel
Take the Guesswork Out of Measuring and Managing Your Legal Spend [Case Study]
Leveraging a variety of outside counsel is common for legal teams of all sizes. Also common is the difficulty for some teams in managing the contacts and firms, the projects each firm is working ...
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Legal Tech
Alternative Fee Arrangements Allow for More Control Over Legal Spend
In a Altman Weil survey of large and midsize law firms, 95% said they use Alternative Fee Arrangements (AFAs). Two-thirds of these firms report their use of AFAs is primarily reactive in response...
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In-House Counsel
Is Data Putting a Strain on Relationships with Outside Counsel?
Since the publication of the GC Open Letter, announcing a real-time exercise to test industry assumptions to better understand how to improve the legal market, there’s been a lot of chatter aro...
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SimpleLegal Updates
SimpleLegal Team Members Share Their Favorite Product Features
At SimpleLegal, we understand (and love!) that our users are in the system on a daily basis. Because of that, it’s always been our goal to provide GCs, legal operations professionals, and in-h...
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Legal Operations
Accruals Management Part II: Best Practices for Improving Your Accruals Process
In part I of our accruals management series, we summarized why accruals are important, and how legal operations departments tend to be more equipped to own the accruals process than finance depar...
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Legal Operations
Accruals Management Part I: Why Are Accruals So Important?
Last month, hundreds of legal operations professionals gathered at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, taking part in the 2nd annual CLOC Institute, the largest legal operations event in history. The orga...
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Legal Tech
Breaking Down the Legal Invoice Handoff to Accounts Payable
An invoice from outside counsel is received. It’s reviewed by the in-house legal team. It’s approved (or sometimes rejected, sent back to the outside vendor for modifications, and the...
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Legal Tech
Make Your Legal Department More Efficient Today
Businesses today are emphasizing the importance of understanding corporate expenditures and ROI. This, of course, includes outside counsel spend. In-house legal departments are no longer exempt f...
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In-House Counsel
6 Ways To Build Better Relationships with Outside Counsel
Part of the challenge as a general counsel is getting the best work out of your outside counsel for the best value. Even with good intentions, it doesn’t always pan out this way. Your prioritie...
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In-House Counsel
Become a Data-Driven General Counsel
As a general counsel, you rely on your outside counsel and in-house expertise to direct your company in the right direction. You’ll read through dozens of case studies, a mountain of text, and ...
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In-House Counsel
Feature Interview: How GCs are Transforming the Legal Department with Katie Biber
As corporate law stretches and changes under the weight of new business structures, so too has the role of general counsel. Tasked with overseeing the legal footprint of their companies, general ...
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Legal Operations
Feature Interview: Insights into Legal Operations with Google’s Mary O’Carroll
Corporate law departments are spending more on in-house resources than on law firms or external legal service providers, with the percentage of general counsel stating their companies need dedica...
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In-House Counsel
Feature Interview: Moving In-House Counsel Melissa Tidwell
As corporate law stretches and changes under the weight of new business structures, so too has the role of the general counsel. Tasked with overseeing the legal footprint of their companies, gene...
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In-House Counsel
Deciding It’s Time for e-Billing
Raising the Bar We understand why general counsel at some companies put off buying a legal e-Billing system as long as they possibly can. Software from legacy vendors can be clunky and hard to s...
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Legal Tech
GCs, Legal Ops & CFOs Have More Productive Conversations with Data
Why Are We Spending So Much in Legal? One SimpleLegal customer (a public tech company with legal department that grew from a team of 1 to a team of 14) was told by his finance department that he ...
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Legal Tech
One Question to Add to Your RFP: Are You the Future?
I’m lucky. I get to live in the future. I see self-driving cars every single day. We all live in the future in our personal lives. We can click a button to summon a car for a lift t...
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In-House Counsel
What does a 200-Page Legal Bill Look Like?
At SimpleLegal, we believe data can change the world. We also believe, it doesn’t have to be complicated. Simple isn’t easy, but it’s worth it. That’s why I get excited w...
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In-House Counsel
The First Step to Controlling Legal Spend
We’re committed to bringing transparency to CFOs for every expense entry on their P&Ls. We started with legal expense because it has the biggest opportunity for improvement. Customers w...
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In-House Counsel
Big Law, Big Bill. For Now.
Controlling the Chaos SimpleLegal is the easiest way for a company to understand and reduce their legal spend. Instead of piles of paper or emailed PDFs, we offer one place to receive, review, an...
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