Take the guesswork out of measuring & managing your legal spend

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 on, and how much they are charging. For Adroll, this task was nearly impossible. Fortunately, they found SimpleLegal and achieved a system of record for their legal department!

A Lack of Transparency

In my conversations with Megan Scolari (Legal Operations Project Manager) and Jia Hua Juszczak (Senior Accountant) at AdRoll, I could tell that the two departments (legal and finance) had a good working relationship, but turns out things weren’t always that way. It was clear that the team needed to get out of their email and into a proper legal operations tool. With the difficulty in tracking the actual amount spent on legal bills, paired with large year end adjustments specifically for legal, it made sense that there might have been some friction between them. A lack of transparency can do that.

Creating Process, Visibility, and Collaboration

For the legal team, the process of reviewing invoices, flagging any potential billing errors, and providing that feedback to law firms through SimpleLegal has significantly improved, and has provided huge time and cost savings for AdRoll. Additionally, with their vendor and invoice data easily accessible in SimpleLegal, they are able to evaluate their partnerships with their outside vendors. In one instance, they identified a law firm that was billing for tasks that had not been requested and billing extra hours for simple tasks.

According to finance, the accruals automation is the biggest benefit. No surprise here, given that their #1 job is … no surprises. Law firm responses to monthly unbilled estimate requests increased, and their year end adjustments dropped significantly. They were finally able to get a clearer picture and predict their outside legal spend.

You can read the full case study here.

It’s time to take the guesswork out of measuring and managing your legal spend.