CounselLink Conference 2021: Fall Session Recap and Takeaways

On November 9 – 10, we held our CounselLink Conference 2021: Fall Session with the theme Driving Efficiency, Automation, and Insight as a Legal Operations Leader. The conference focused on making better day-to-day and strategic decisions related to financial management and oversight. With LexisNexis^® CounselLink^®, you have all the tools you need to make better decisions and improve legal department operations. While that’s essential, CounselLink can also make many of your daily tasks easier with simplified processes that are streamlined and automated.

The conference helped attendees learn how to optimize workflows and how to better inform and facilitate their legal department decision-making. Here’s the recap and key takeaways from the event. You can also visit the CounselLink Conference resources site to access all session recordings, documents, and Q&A follow-up.

During the conference, customers shared how they’re using CounselLink to streamline and automate their processes, and attendees got an in-depth look at CounselLink’s capabilities and new features from our product experts. Plus, we shared the product roadmap for CounselLink, so you’ll know what’s coming next and what to expect in 2022.

How other customers use CounselLink

Gaining financial management maturity enables your legal department to better predict legal spend, develop more accurate budgets, and better manage financial risk.

1. Compile reports for single-matter budgets (micro budgets) and multi-matter budgets (macro budgets). This way, you can easily show how each of the single matter budgets (or even a group of them) impacted the overall multi-matter budgets.
2. Use dashboards to visually show spend versus budget to GC, CLO, Finance, business managers, and other stakeholders.
3. Save time and effort with automated processes that:
   1. Monitor spend versus budget for you and flag when client-defined thresholds are met or reject invoices when budgets are exceeded
   2. Auto-add matters to multi-matter budgets based on certain criteria
   3. Allow you to use the My Budgets view for quick access to spend versus budget (including color visualization)

Learning the capabilities and new features of CounselLink 

Our product development team incorporates client feedback to continually build new capabilities and improve the user experience. This session walks customers through the latest enhancements—from interpreting the new dashboards to streamlining processes such as legal requests, matter tasks, report subscriptions, and more.

Analytics

1. Multiple dashboards make it easier to visually show and understand financial matters. This will help you better manage costs and vendors, drive efficiency, and prove the value that your legal department brings to the business.
2. With the CounselLink 21.4 release, all users can view the Analytic Dashboards, specific roles are no longer required. If you don’t see “Dashboards” on the Analytics tab, contact customer care.
3. Also, new after the Q4 release (Nov 13), within the Insight dashboards, customers will see a tab that provides detail of their timekeepers that are the basis of the benchmark statistics for their company.

Automation

1. Set up an automated monitor that checks matter tasks for consistency, structure, and compliance.
2. Set up a Reporting Subscription that provides data needed to non-CounselLink audiences via automated email delivery.
3. Manage various types of legal requests using a legal portal framework that acts as a gateway between your business partners, outside counsel, and legal operations.

Efficiency

1. Aggregate spend across multiple matters by using multi-matter budgeting to help save time and effort. Supported by a centralized location of subset of matters with measurable parameters.
2. Speed up the invoice review process by leveraging combined invoice review.
3. Introduce automation by defining criteria for multi-matter budgeting and email manager.
   • CounselLink will collect matters to aggregate spend across an internal budget.
   • System triggered emails will automatically have your custom language & instructions.

What’s next for CounselLink: Looking ahead to 2022

Our approach to product development and introducing new features is very strategic, so that we can ensure you have a well-rounded product with CounselLink. Empower your team with the best tools to help prove the true value of your legal department.

In 2022, CounselLink will continue to deliver new capabilities to help you better control costs, better manage your work and vendors, provide you the analytics you need to make informed strategic and operational decisions, and enhance the user experience. Below are just a few highlights from our 2022 product roadmap:

• Forecasting that provides more visibility into overall spend.
• System-triggered events that empower the user to manage how work is routed.
• Roles and Permissions that increase the flexibility of assigning permissions while reducing the time to manage user roles.

To access or share the conference sessions with your co-workers, click here. These recordings will be available until February 2022.

Reach out to your Account Managers for more information on CounselLink, access the CounselLink Conference 2021 resources site, or to share your CounselLink feedback with us.

We look forward to seeing you at future events!