Managing The Law Department With A Tighter Budget: How Integrating Legal Research And Litigation Tools Improves Risk Management

Readers of The Metropolitan Corporate Counsel will recall an article in last month's issue by my colleague, Marcus Linden, which explained how the era in which in-house law departments were somewhat insulated from the effects of economic cycles has officially passed. Legal chiefs today are more pressed than ever to control legal costs, a task made more daunting because of increased government regulations and litigation workloads.

This set of circumstances has been discussed for a while now in anecdotes shared by in-house counsel, but recent studies have actually benchmarked the fact that the pressure to "do more with less" is now a reality for many in-house law departments. For example, a recent LexisNexis CounselLink study conducted by Corporate Counsel and published by Incisive Media found that 68 percent of in-house legal professionals feel pressure to reduce the law department budget, and a majority of them have already experienced actual reductions in total budgets (58.9 percent). Another 2009 study, conducted by consulting firm Lexakos, found that 40 percent of legal departments expected a decrease in their overall operating budget for 2009, compared to only 8 percent last year.

So faced with the reality of tighter budgets, how can in-house counsel figure out a way to fulfill their primary business responsibility of minimizing risk while reducing their costs during these challenging economic times? Clearly, there is no single answer to this dilemma, but one specific technology-driven strategy that many progressive law departments are embracing is the integration of online legal research with robust litigation support tools.

Litigation As A Business Endeavor

At first glance, the integration of legal research with litigation tools might seem an unlikely business strategy for corporate law departments seeking to do more with less, but the legal industry has clearly seen a shift in recent years toward business-driven strategies to more effectively manage dispute resolution.

In a broad sense, most corporations are built around processes and continuous process improvement. That mindset and framework is now being applied to corporate law departments and moving downstream to law firms as well - and for good reason. Litigation is more than an area of practice within the legal profession; it is a business endeavor that can have a profound impact on the financial health of a corporation. As a result, corporate executives are increasingly expecting a project management-style approach from their in-house legal departments when it comes to their oversight of the litigation portfolio.

At LexisNexis, we are now seeing a surge of interest among corporations interested in putting processes in place to gain greater control and insight early and throughout the litigation process. This trend from viewing litigation as a practice to viewing it as a business process is an important one to monitor.

The fact is that many departments are unaware of just how disconnected their various litigation processes are right now. Consider just a few examples and the extent to which they are integrated in your organization:

Conducting early case assessment;

Investigating witnesses and experts;

Researching case law;

Capturing and culling document collections; and

Reviewing and producing documents.

There are some important in-house law department areas of daily responsibility in which an integration of these litigation and research processes can yield substantial risk management benefits for the organization.

To Continue Reading: Click Here
-----------------------------------------------
Source: Metropolitan Corporate Counsel
By: Craig Bennett