Serengeti featured in Metropolitan Corporate Counsel
In an article recently published in Metropolitan Corporate Counsel online, Patrick Johnson, senior marketer for Serengeti discusses the importance of legal spend and matter management software. Effectively tracking vendor legal matters and spending are of the utmost importance to efficiently managing even a small legal department. While accounts payable (A/P) software can report on some basic spending categories, it is unable to track vital data that is necessary for a legal department to project and report on the true value it provides.
According to Johnson, reports from A/P software are incomplete and not granular enough for a legal department’s purposes. Modern software as a service (SaaS) legal solutions allow legal bills to be entered using the industry-wide standardized electronic format for legal invoices. By requiring law firms and vendors to submit their invoices in this format, an ebilling system will automatically capture all of the useful data in a legal invoice, such as what work was done, who did it, what it cost, staffing levels and categories of expenses. In addition, dissecting legal spend is essential for a legal department to be able to comprehensively review, understand and report on spend and their legal matters. SaaS solutions allow in-house counsel to review and make specific changes to attorney hours, fees and expenses directly in the invoice. These invoices also can be scanned and automatically flagged if expense guidelines are violated or budgets are exceeded.
To read the full article on the Metropolitan Corporate Counsel website, click here. To read a Serengeti white paper titled, “Rolling the Dice: Why Relying on A/P and Invoice Approval Software May Be a Dangerous Game,” visit the Serengeti website.
