Learnings from a veteran user of Serengeti Tracker
Serengeti Tracker has been helping legal departments improve their operations for more than a decade. Assistant General Counsel Jim Sullivan of FMC Technologies, one of the first Serengeti customers, shared his insights at the 2014 Serengeti Summit and how his law department leverages Serengeti Tracker.
Sullivan noted that Serengeti Tracker may be best known as an electronic billing system, but through that, the tool offers much more. With access to the more than $10 billion worth of anonymized invoicing data flowing through Serengeti Tracker annually, legal departments have the ability to use that data to better understand and evaluate their legal spend and even provide detailed cost analysis for business units or specific cost centers.
During an analytics breakout session at the summit, an example of data points within Serengeti Tracker were used to demonstrate ways legal departments can gain valuable insights into trends, issues and more, helping lead to more effective and actionable decisions. And by using the analytics, legal departments have the ability to benchmark their spend against their peers.
Sullivan discussed the ACES program FMC Technologies has implemented for use with their outside firms. ACES (Alliance Council Engagement System) is a tool that the legal department uses to improve service received from outside counsel. Through ACES, FMC Technologies withholds a portion of payment from each invoice they receive. Then at a designated time and based on evaluations of each firm within Serengeti Tracker, firms receive some, all or more of the amount withheld during the course of the year. The belief is that performance level pay drives behavior. And if the work one receives is of the highest quality, ultimately everyone benefits.
Additionally, Sullivan called out the FileZone feature in Tracker. FileZone can serve as the repository to help manage documents creating one point of access and a centralized location to save time, money and more easily provide data through the discovery process or document review.
At the end, Sullivan noted that by leveraging Serengeti Tracker and having the multiple data points in the system, legal departments are better able to plan and budget for their needs.
