OVERVIEW

Whoever said that you can’t see the future by looking at the past never tried the LawMaps™ solution. Our innovative algorithms transform matter analytics and planning by molding existing billing data into powerfully actionable context. In the hands of your matter managers, this means more informed decisions, less waste, more accurate forecasting, better matter outcomes, and happier clients.

Don’t take our word for it, read what Buying Legal (2018 Legal Spend Management Primer) says are the most important legal spend management initiatives:

1. refine outside counsel guidelines and implement invoice review;
2. law firm selection and management;
3. rate and timekeeper management;
4. matter level budgeting and project management;
5. unbundling alternative sourcing strategies (including contract lawyers + managed services);
6. panel/convergence strategies; and
7. law firm relationship management.

We’re doing our part by transforming how outside counsel and legal departments collaborate. We’re proud LawMaps contributes to all seven spend initiatives Buying Legal raised.

The LawMaps approach to legal spend management is holistic. We don’t believe that squeezing your law firm partners is the best way to address legal spend problems. Instead, we believe that you need to understand the problem before you can develop a sustainable correction. To us, that means understanding all of the parts of legal spend and how they work together before trying to fix individual components. In other words, we take the view that if there is a problem with legal spend (e.g., we don’t know how much we spend on legal matters; we’re not sure if our litigation spend is well aligned with our business goals; too high relative to ROI; it’s just too damn high; etc.), then the first step to fixing the problem is finding the root cause.

LawMaps addresses the fact that inadequate communication is at the root of most legal spend failures. The law firm doesn’t really understand the client’s needs. And the client doesn’t really know what the law firm is doing until it’s too late to do anything about it.

We’ve developed a patented way to create and track budget performance for legal matters.  LawMaps budgets are life-of-matter budgets. That means that they cover the longitudinal span of the case, from inception to post appeal closure and lessons learned. They are latitudinally inclusive budgets, which means that they include not just the fees for the law firm preparing the budget, LawMaps budgets incorporate all fees for everyone billing to that case. For instance, many cases involve investigators, court reporters, trial presentation vendors, mediators, mock trial vendors, e-discovery vendors, subject matter experts, local counsel, speciality counsel, and appellate counsel. LawMaps budgets include not just the fees for these vendors, but their expenses as well. Travel costs, video costs, etc.

LawMaps is a TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) approach to the budgeting dispute resolution. That means that in addition to having the total budget for the case always available for the matter manager to review.  are not partial they are inclusive. In addition to the fees and expense of everyone working on the case, they include local counsel costs, No more partial budgets. LawMaps allows outside counsel to budget the full breadth and depth of the case. Not just the timekeepers employed by the law firm, but everyone who will bill time on the case. This includes experts, investigators, court reporters, eDiscovery vendors, trial technology vendors, and so on. The budgets also include not just fees, but expenses as well such as travel expenses (airfare, hotels, rental cars, meals, etc.).

The budget is not month by month by month, but life of matter instead. Forecasting is automatic and accurate based on a sophisticated analysis of existing data and life of case budgets for similar matters. Like Google Maps, LawMaps is responsive and allows the matter manager to look ahead. Our simple and consistently formatted budgets explicitly incorporate the assumptions built into the budget.

Whether a bespoke budget by outside counsel or a template budget. That way, in the event of changes beyond the control of outside counsel, the matter manager has the discretion to budget revisions. Regardless of whether matter budgets are template based or bespoke, they roll up to aggregate budgets in any view the matter manager selects, limited only by permissions set by the client. With LawMaps, spend is clearly and simply aligned against spend.

Your matter managers will know which timebillers are working on which matters. You matter managers will know, and be able to articulate, the role and responsibility of each time biller.  You matter manager will know whether a matter is a strategic trial candidate or a potential trial candidate. They will know the current status and history behind the demands, reserves, settlement authority, offers, mock jury results. The LawMaps Process facilitates efficient and effective strategic communication between outside counsel and the matter manager.

The LawMaps workflow is simple and straightforward – There are three basic steps. Select the team, prepare the plan, and manage the matter.

That’s LegalKaizen. Stay in business. We can help.