866-448-5871
The following Impact Awards submission was written by Brenda Simmons, Paralegal for Brasfield & Gorrie LLC. Ms. Simmons is one of three Impact Award winners for 2017. All three winning submissions are being featured in Business of Law blog posts from LexisNexis.
Brasfield & Gorrie had fifty years of matters, invoices, and contracts recorded on paper when I arrived.
It was my job to go through the paper and record it in an Excel spreadsheet to make it easy to find data. After a few months, I had it recorded and it was very helpful.
Brasfield & Gorrie was growing fast and was now a $2.6 billion company. Our General Counsel suggested that we may be ready to take a giant leap forward and purchase matter management software. We reviewed a lot of software over the next few months, and found it easy to narrow down to two possible winners.
One of the presenters was very good at salesmanship, but their software was just not the whole nine yards.
We scheduled an online interview with CounselLink from LexisNexis, and I could see there was something there.
After a second CounselLink presentation, it was easy to see that CounselLink could meet our current needs and LexisNexis had plans to continue developing it to make our purchase worth the money.
It didn’t take long before we wanted more, and increased our contract to a more advanced package.
After many years of paper, CounselLink has turned our matter management situation around. Yes, some of our outside law firms were pulled into the program kicking and screaming, but after a while, they also found that it was easier.
We now have all our matters, invoices, and many documents housed in CounselLink. As you can imagine, the outside firms (75-100 firms) were submitting invoices that had various rates (that changed monthly) and did not give good descriptions. It made it very hard to know just what we were approving.
With CounselLink we started realizing a savings in invoicing immediately. The first year resulted in a $60,000 savings, and now with our Billing Guidelines built into the system, CounselLink flags invoices with problems before they come to us.
We now have 12 offices throughout the Southeast, so matter management connects us.
I’d like to give a special shout-out to my incredible CounselLink AE Michael Wells. He makes it happen. Also to Deepro Basu and Doug Zickafoose for amazing dashboards that make a difference in my reporting life.
We look forward to a long productive relationship going forward with CounselLink.
