Canadian Lawyer InHouse

41 CANADIANLAWYERMAG.COM/INHOUSE JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2019 cant portion of my day keeping track of these invoices, to say nothing of the fact that once they were paid they sat in a drawer somewhere and no one ever looked at them again. We were losing all the potential data sitting in those invoices telling us who was doing what and depriving us of any line of sight into those vendors and the work they were doing for us." Alani knew something had to be done about the invoice review and collection process. After evaluating several software systems, Alani settled on a product from Simple Legal. "Everything was gravy," he says. "Quite often, before we moved to Simple Legal, our vendors would set up these general matter buckets and things would go to general fi les. Basically, every time we send a request to ex- ternal counsel, we set up a discrete matter that is tagged to a specifi c department budget — a customized approval workfl ow — so exactly the right people have visibility on the spend." SimpleLegal launched in 2013 and in- cludes e-billing, matter management, ac- cruals automation and advanced reporting to help legal departments streamline and L a w D e p a r t m e n t M a n a g e m e n t PHOTO: KIM STALLKNECT make informed decisions. The company's CEO, Nathan Wenzel, says he thinks lawyers get a bad reputation around their adoption of technology. "I don't think they are necessarily technology phobic; I think it's more about the process and culture of the law fi rm side," he says. "They know that other departments have these great systems that talk to each other and work well together. If you look at folks who have gone in-house, especially around the movement around legal ops, you have folks who are really looking to technology to leverage what they do." On the law fi rm side, it's about hours and, on the in-house side, it's about outcomes, he says. "In-house teams have grown in the last 10 years by seven times the rate of law fi rm headcount," he says. "This idea of growing solely based on headcount starts to present challenges and so you want to provide for scale. So, we provide tools to allow legal de- partments to grow for scale." The Simple Legal system has been in place at the City of Abbotsford for just more than a year now. They sell to the corporate client side but have tools law fi rms use such as uploading documents, status updates, etc. Using the system has been a "night and day difference," Alani says. "From the ven- dor side, they are seeing payments delivered electronically into their account from a week of submitting an invoice to us. What used to take weeks to collect those internal ap- provals on paper invoices now takes days if not hours. Everything is logged; it's secure. There is accessibility any time anywhere — I don't have to wait weeks for a bill to be populated in our accounting system — I know from the moment it's submitted I can see from my iPad or iPhone how much has been spent." Having the data available allows Alani to answer questions from city staff and council more immediately and there is open access to city management if they want to know ex- actly how much is being spent. "In that way, it's made the legal spend a lot more collaborative in the organiza- tion — the data isn't siloed off in the legal department or in fi nance. It's easy enough to use that staff feel pretty comfortable go- ing in and doing a deep dive whenever they want," he says. Overall, he says, the system has "easily paid for itself." "It's a huge savings in person power," he says. "We previously had a fi ling clerk re- ceive the invoices, stamp them, hand-write accounting codes on them and shuffl e them through the organization manually collect- ing signatures. Once all the approvals came in then they had to redact sensitive informa- tion before going to accounts payable. Now, all of that labour is just eliminated. The invoice comes in electronically and exactly the right people see it in their inboxes and review and click approve. The billing data goes right to the city's SAP system and gets deposited to the vendor bank account the same week." Some new features of the Simple Legal tool include alternative fee arrangement en- forcement including fi xed or fl at fees, fi xed total costs, task-based fees, blended rates, vol- ume discounts, vendor-specifi c rate cards and matter-specifi c rate against various rate cards. While Alani has only recently started experimenting with alternative fee arrange- ments, he says the system does handle the volume discount arrangements the city has with external fi rms. "The system handles all of that really well. With the time keeper validations, we preload all the agreed-upon rates and it gets fl agged for whatever reason if an invoice comes in that doesn't align with that," he says. Wenzel says the evolution he has seen is that the conversation is no longer just that "legal is expensive, why are we spending so much on legal" to general counsel who want to showcase what they are doing to move business objectives forward. It's not just about where are the dollars going, it's more about what legal is working on to show value to the business. "You see general counsel moving into other roles in the C-suite. We see compa- nies such as Airbnb where both of their gen- eral counsel has moved into the COO role. The role has changed and so that changes what they want from technology — it's not just where are the dollars going but how can I show them I'm pushing the business for- ward; that's the big change we see." IH I didn't want to spend a signifi cant portion of my day keeping track of these invoices, to say nothing of the fact that once they were paid they sat in a drawer somewhere and no one ever looked at them again. We were losing all the potential data sitting in those invoices telling us who was doing what and depriving us of any line of sight into those vendors and the work they were doing for us. ANIZ ALANI, City of Abbotsford

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