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The CounselLink® Conference 2019 is coming to Atlanta this September, and we have a lot in store with hands-on training, customer panels, 1:1 support at the Insights Bar, and best practices from product experts. Kim Jamison, Senior Business Consultant from the Professional Services team, is going in-depth on Work Management during this year’s conference.
The benefits of this conference include meeting other CounselLink users, exchanging ideas, and sharing experiences. During this presentation we will do just that—sharing how our customers are using Work Management to collect, organize, track, audit, and report all the work performed within their legal departments.
Let’s explore the journey into Work Management and what that means to you. Here is a quick look into how you can potentially incorporate all legal activity and tasks into one common workspace. Work Management is more than just managing matters, it’s managing business—all of the legal business.
What features encompass CounselLink’s Work Management?
For our clients, we know Work Management means using LexisNexis® CounselLink to manage not only your matters but all other work performed within your legal department. These features help with collecting, organizing, tracking, auditing, and reporting on all your legal department’s activities, including:
- Legal requests (matter workflow)
- Legal holds
- Custom data
- Outlook add-ins
- Work tasks (calendar)
- Documents
- Journaling (matter notes)
- Matter contacts
- Matter participants
Think about how many features you are using today and, alternately, which ones you are not. As your workloads increase, start implementing some of these new features to help you continually advance your legal department. It’s important to grow with the system and learn about what else you can be doing to help manage some of these legal tasks.
For example, if you are tracking all your legal holds in a spreadsheet and find it hard to manage all the notifications and each one’s status, take a tour of our legal hold functionality. It manages all holds, notifications (including reminders), and statuses.
Should I be integrating other systems into CounselLink?
Work Management includes ALL the work performed in the legal department, and sometimes it’s not just CounselLink. We can integrate with:
- HR systems
- Document management systems
- AP systems
- IP systems
- Claims systems
- SOP systems
- And more
Think about all the work you do and if it makes sense to house other information within CounselLink. At the end of the day, if CounselLink works for you, all of your reporting is complete and in one place. It can also automate internal processes, allowing more time for other important activities. For example, if you have a large number of matters coming from a service or process provider like CT Corp or CSC, then CounselLink can integrate and create matters automatically for you. That way, you don’t have manual processes, everything gets captured (you still have the data even if you close the matter), and it increases overall efficiency, giving time back to your team.
How should I start the Work Management conversation in my legal department?
Here are three key tips to approaching Work Management in your legal department:
- Think about the end in mind.
- Figure out your KPIs and make sure you have all the data to measure and report on those in the system.
- Make a list and work with your CounselLink team to see how you can capture everything for easy reporting.
For example, if one of your performance indicators is quicker invoice approval by a certain department, make sure that department list is in CounselLink as an office or custom data field. Then you can run our “Average Invoice Approval” report to compare month-by-month timing. You can review the data and even create charts within our reporting tool.
By starting the Work Management conversation, you can begin finding new ways of automating and improving your legal operations. Let CounselLink show you how we can help with this journey and create a plan with tangible results that you can take to your management team. We hope you join us at CounselLink Conference 2019 to learn more!
Kelley has worked for LexisNexis since 2006, starting with the CounselLink Account Management team. She has a several awards, most notably Consultant of the year in 2016. Now today, she manages our Business Consultant team in the Professional Services Organization, providing leadership and direction, supporting revenue goals and optimizing processes to better meet our customer’s needs. Prior to joining LexisNexis, Kelley spent time in the advertising and marketing fields, including working for a non-profit golf organization for kids.