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hello everybody thanks for joining us today i am stacey coote a partner at coote o'grady we are a legal spam management company today given everybody is likely focused on savings at the moment in the current environment we thought it would be useful to revisit a project that we won an award for with the buying legal council last year as you can see we were actually runner-up in the process improvement award area this was for a project with a fortune 100 automotive client essentially in 10 weeks we saved the client 33 on its external legal spend which is around 3 million us dollars so the client brief the client was very much tied to its existing law firms due to the complex nature of work that these firms were performing but the legal team were under huge pressure from the finance team to reduce their spend the team and the general counsel had tried to negotiate better discounts uh etc with their firms um but hadn't had much success so they handed essentially the project over to us um to try and deliver some savings for them one of the key things was as i said that it was long-standing existing relationships with the law firms and they didn't want those relationships to be damaged and that's why they brought our organization so what we achieved so we achieved 33 percent uh around 3 million u.s dollars in just 10 weeks we also got value-added services access for the client so a number of technology apps and free comments from the law firms as well and we put a structured process in place around the engagement of law firms moving forward for the first time as well our strategy so it was really broken into two phases review the existing legal spend um and then work with the client to make sure that they were comfortable with phase two which was essentially a partner-led negotiation uh on the top spending law firms uh in conjunction with the legal review legal invoice review exercise to identify opportunities implementation so the client needed needed these savings quickly so we had a prince2 qualified um project management practitioner who's also a solicitor work with the team to make sure that we delivered the results that we needed to we did some initial benchmarking across a number of countries we formalized processes around billing guidelines and engagement terms and also worked with the client and the firms around a lot of age debt that existed we negotiated with the top three firms an agreed rate card and proper terms of engagement and billing guidelines as well as setting up a value value-added services program and we reviewed over 2000 line items of invoice data to look at what some of the issues were with historic invoices we also worked on a success fee basis and this meant that the client could trust us to deliver results and we continue to work with them now so the results were that all three firms accepted the new terms and conditions agreed discounts and discounted hourly rates and discounts on their invoices i should say so some of the invoices there were some poor billing practices going on so we negotiated with the firms on those as well as negotiating uh discounts for future invoices we put a program in place of value-added services that i mentioned already that delivered over 600 000 in benefits we dealt with the age debt and all of this was done with no work for the in-house legal team which was a big objective of the team because they had so much work going on they didn't really want to be involved in this process so given the current environment we thought it'd be useful to give some top tips on how to optimize your spend or budget in 2020 maybe into 2021 at this point firstly negotiate with your firms know your industry and how your rates compare to similar organizations review your invoices effectively to make sure that there aren't bad billing practices happening consider the efficiency of your current legal spend management processes and whether there's more that needs to be done there and are you achieving value-added services from your firms and if not then look to put those put some sort of program in place around that from the negotiations the things we learned were that a lot of law firms now have got pricing specialists so while it's quite difficult to have conversations with people you're working with on a day-to-day basis by talking to the pricing specialist this makes it a little easier for clients clients are often afraid to negotiate with their firms but actually it's a lot easier with these pricing specialists being in place now because it takes away from the day-to-day relationship the negotiations are often seen as time consuming and in truth they can be but if you've got the right level of expertise it can be carried out very quickly and i think that's where expertise is key and for any procurement folks listening to this webinar i think it's important to know that buying legal isn't like buying other areas and you really need to have expertise in the category to achieve best value for money a legal invoice review there's lots of savings that can be made through legal invoice review there's a lot of misspelling unfortunately and we think that a lawyer supervised review is is much better than system led solutions um and the savings we've seen anything up to 26 percent on on certain invoices where there's some really bad practices but it's very quick and easy to implement we've put invoice review processes in place within 24 hours for clients and so i definitely think it's an area to look at when you're focused on savings processors um the things we've learned definitive guidelines are really important um firms need to know what they can and can't build for and it needs to be agreed on both sides so that there's not debates over this and there needs to be structure around it because if you get into this situation of debating over every invoice this is when the age debt builds up and then the firms can get quite frustrated at the level of age debt the structured approach around legal spend management or legal operations for budgeting and invoice management really does make sure that firms get paid when they should be paid for the work that they've carried out for you but you need processes and you need to communicate those processes value-added services i think the biggest learning is don't be afraid to ask um a lot of law firms are happy to provide value-added services but a lot of clients don't ask for them you need to think as well about what's valuable for you and ask for the things that are actually valuable to you so that's all about our reward if you'd like to talk to us further about how we can help you of your legal spend we'd be like delighted to talk to you um there's our contact details there and as i say we do hope to hear from you but good luck in managing your legal spend thank you for listening