The Americold

Americold’s legal invoice processing was manual and time-consuming, which led to paying higher outside legal fees. There wasn’t a consolidated approach for legal vendor selection; internal departments hired law firms at times without any uniform approval process or monitoring of compliance with billing guidelines. As Americold’s business grew, the company needed a solution that would handle the increasing workload efficiently and create consistencies within the legal department—without adding headcount. The answer: Americold implemented CounselLink to streamline, automate, and monitor its legal operations while providing the reports necessary to demonstrate the value of the work performed within the legal department.

Challenge No consistent, standardized process exists for reviewing invoices.

All invoice processing was manual and often led to subjective reviews by busy attorneys or staff. Once an invoice was physically reviewed and approved, the legal department still had to manually feed the invoice into SAP and approve any edits. At times, payments were delayed as invoices were lost or sitting on someone’s desk. There was a real need to organize, standardize, and automate the invoice review and approval process.

The Solution CounselLink automates and streamlines Americold’s invoice process.

With CounselLink, the legal department now has established billing guidelines, creating consistency within the legal department. The system automatically checks the date each invoice is submitted, and every charge description contained in each invoice against the billing guidelines, ensuring that timely and proper charges are made. As a result, Americold’s legal team handles more work in less time and with more accuracy—all without increasing headcount. VP and Deputy General Counsel Dan Deckbar said, “The invoices are scrubbed against the billing guidelines, and bills are reviewed objectively, helping invoices clear much faster. It’s easier on us. We typically don’t have law firms complaining that bills aren’t paid.” Christie Snezek, Commercial Paralegal, commented, “CounselLink reduces the time I spend on billing and invoices by more than 30% with the computerized scrubbing of the guidelines. Also, the full SAP integration with CounselLink makes the invoice feed into SAP effortless. It transfers at lightning speed, and it’s a huge paper and time savings—on top of the 30% I mentioned before.” CounselLink is so successful at streamlining Americold’s invoicing processes that, to date, the subscription has paid for itself from invoice adjustments alone.

CounselLink—rich on value and functionality

By implementing CounselLink, the Americold legal department streamlined and became the gatekeeper for all legal operations, which improved bill processing, law firm review, fee management, and reporting. “I think we are absolutely getting our value out of the system, and there’s even more that we can do with it,” explains Dan. “Since we’ve conquered our fee and invoicing struggle, I want us to use more of the matter management functionalities in addition to the spend management. I also use the cloud-based and Outlook integration functionalities. CounselLink has definitely made life easier for us in the office and on the go. And we’ve just gotten started.”