4 Legal Department Management Resources That Make Legal Teams More Efficient

Do more. Do it better. Deliver real value. Sound familiar?

It isn’t enough for today’s in-house legal teams to act as legal advisors to the broader business. Instead, corporate legal departments are increasingly being called on to become a true strategic partner, meeting the growing demand for legal services while keeping a firm rein on the budget and delivering strategic value.

In that environment, legal department efficiency isn’t a bonus anymore; it’s the baseline.

The good news? This is an area where legal operations professionals excel. With the right tech and tools, your legal operations team can be at the heart of delivering more efficient, better-aligned, strategic services that contribute to achieving key business outcomes.

This blog covers the four essential legal department management tools that every legal team needs to reach that goal: e-billing, matter management, contract lifecycle management, and document management systems. Here’s why they’re non-negotiables.

E-Billing Solutions

Manual legal spend management — which often involves spreadsheets, emails, and late-night number crunching — is one of the most significant sources of inefficiency in legal departments. At its best, it results in a protracted and frequently delayed payment process. At its worst, it can lead to costly mistakes and a lack of critical visibility into the company’s overall legal spend.

So why do teams stick to this manual approach despite these issues? Often, it’s because it feels familiar, or because adopting new legal department management software seems too complex or time-consuming. However, forward-thinking legal ops teams increasingly use e-billing solutions for improved invoicing and legal spend management.

Recent data from the Association of Corporate Counsel’s (ACCs) Law Department Management Benchmarking Report shows that e-billing platforms are one of the top legal tech tools that organizations turn to in order to control costs. Their data shows an e-billing adoption rate of nearly 40% amongst companies of all sizes, spiking to more than 80% for the biggest corporations.

And for good reason. Using an automated, AI-powered e-billing system allows legal departments to:

• Consistently enforce their billing guidelines, reducing non-compliant charges and improving cost control.
• Accurately track accruals, enabling more reliable forecasting and tighter alignment with finance.
• Significantly reduce invoice review time, speed up payments, and strengthen outside counsel law firm relationships.

Good platforms also come with a variety of options for data visualization, including dashboards, that provide legal teams with clarity into their legal spend. That includes categorizing spend by firm, cost center, and matter, and enabling trend visualizations to improve budgeting decisions.

The result is that legal teams can make cost control decisions more proactively, and that individual team members can invest more time into high-value, high-impact work, instead of manually sorting through spreadsheets and invoices.

Matter Management Platforms

Another frequent time sink for legal teams is tracking the information they need to move legal matters forward. When matter details are scattered across emails, shared drives, and offline documents, even minor issues can result in frustrating delays, missed deadlines, and poor business outcomes.

In order to address this, many legal teams have turned to using matter management platforms. A dedicated matter management platform serves as a centralized hub for all matter-related information, making it easy to:

• Manage intake and assign matters according to workloads and team members’ (or outside counsel’s) areas of expertise
• Standardize matter workflows for improved consistency in handling and resolution
• Track matter progress in real-time, with tools like status updates, task assignments, and deadline tracking

This translates to improved team coordination and matter visibility for the legal department, allowing the legal team to operate in a more agile, focused way and to resolve matters quickly.

Worth looking out for when investing in this tech is a platform that also provides in-depth performance evaluation and metrics-tracking/analytics tools. With the ability to dig into current and historical data, the general counsel (and other members of legal leadership) can improve resource allocation, spot trends, and anticipate risk. They can also optimize their legal processes in real-time or in response to business needs, reinforcing the strategic role legal now plays in the broader business landscape.

Many teams benefit from investing in integrated platforms that offer both a matter management and e-billing solution. By combining these functions, legal teams gain complete visibility into their work and spend, which makes it easier to strategize operational improvements. A fact that hasn’t escaped the most prominent corporate players who are, according to ACC’s data, adopting matter management at nearly the same rate as e-billing (83%).

Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) Software

Another area where savvy legal teams heavily invest in tech is contract management. ACC reports that nearly 60% of businesses surveyed use contract management systems, making this software one of the most ubiquitous tools companies of all sizes use.

Why the widespread adoption? A well-implemented CLM system can eliminate some of the most significant contract management pain points, including slow turnaround times, missed renewal or compliance deadlines, and inconsistent language that exposes the business to unnecessary risk.

CLM systems address these inefficiencies through automation of the entire contract management process. That includes making it easier to draft standardized contracts using pre-approved, compliance-ready templates, building in automated approval workflows and improving storage and retrieval.

Additional features to look for in a CLM tool include:

• Integrated e-signature capabilities for faster approvals
• Obligation management features that send automated reminders before critical milestones
• Analytics tools for identifying bottlenecks and inefficiencies

Another factor for legal professionals (and, specifically, legal leaders) to be aware of is the increasing role of artificial intelligence in contract management. By 2027, Gartner predicts that 50% of organizations will use AI for procurement contract risk management analysis and editing. The research giant adds that GenAI is also set to play a more prominent role in general contract processes like M&A due diligence, data extraction, and contract review in the coming years, making this tech a key feature that legal teams should have on their radar when implementing CLM solutions.

Legal Document Management Systems (DMSs)

A dedicated document management system is a final tool worth having in the legal tech toolkit. Where CLM software focuses only on contracts and managing them from start to finish, a legal DMS is more like a searchable, digital filing cabinet. Using a DMS, teams can store, organize, secure and cross-reference every document that comes through the department, from contracts, policies and case files, to compliance documents and invoices.

The apparent advantage of instant-access documentation is that team members no longer need to dig through emails or paper documents to find the necessary information. But there are several additional benefits:

Most DMSs come with version control features, so it’s easier to ensure everyone is working on the latest version of a given document. This also reduces the risk of errors because there aren’t multiple versions of a doc sent back and forth.

A single centralized repository enhances document review, retrieval and approval processes, especially if the solution has metadata tagging capabilities (e.g., allowing you to classify and search for documents by contract type or the parties involved) and advanced search options, like natural language queries powered by GenAI.

Top-end DMS systems are also designed to enhance data security. Look for features like role-based access control, advanced encryption, and detailed audit trails to empower your legal team to safeguard sensitive information.

Another benefit for remote or hybrid teams is that many DMS systems support cloud-based access. With built-in security features, distributed teams can still retrieve and work on sensitive documents, even when out of office.

Like the other legal tech solutions on this list, a sound legal DMS system helps teams by speeding up workflows and reducing administrative work. And that, in turn, contributes to the overarching goals of your legal ops team: making sure that everything in the department runs like clockwork.

Picking the Right Legal Department Management Software to Boost Efficiency

Each tool listed above can potentially improve your legal team’s performance. And by implementing one, you can reduce tedious manual tasks and free up time. But that’s just a starting point. For legal teams looking to transform their operations truly, the key is using legal technology systems that work together to streamline every aspect of their legal work and matters.

At Brightflag, that idea is at the heart of our comprehensive e-billing, matter management and document management platform. Our AI-powered system is designed to give complete visibility into legal work and spend in a single, intuitive platform. And without having to switch between a dozen different tools. All of this makes it easier to get the most out of your team and your budget.

Interested in learning how Brightflag works? Book a demo and let our friendly team talk you through the details.