Enterprise Legal Management (ELM) guarantees that a company’s internal legal staff is productive, transparent, responsible, efficient, and predictable when managing legal matters. Since the 1990s, ELM solutions have grown significantly; by 2028, their market valuation will be $1 billion. ELM is the big thing in enterprise-level legal practices where companies manage in-house counsels to deal with legal issues. It employs cutting-edge software technologies, databases, eDiscovery methodologies, and so forth. Because billions of dollars are at risk in such litigation, companies need best-in-class legal staff and tools. You’ve arrived at the correct place if you’re an enterprise-level business representative seeking the finest ELM software for your corporation. Alternatively, suppose you are a group of professionals with legal and software development specialists who want to create the next great ELM tool. In that case, we have several cutting-edge ELM solutions to inspire you below.
What Is Enterprise Legal Management (ELM)?
Large businesses have their in-house legal departments. Enterprise legal management monitors corporate law departments’ administration, operation, strategies, duties, and performance. ELM is a branch of corporate management that also represents a set of tasks such as legal cost management, legal e-billing, corporate budgeting, intellectual property (IP) management, securities management, supervising finance process compliance, and so on. Contemporary software development technologies have enabled the creation of a comprehensive app capable of handling all legal matters for an enterprise-level business. For example, consider the following tasks that are within the purview of ELM:
1 – Mergers and acquisitions.
2 – Dispute resolution and litigations.
3 – Product, business, service, or IP licensing.
4 – Trademark management.
5 – Compliance and governance via legal norms.
6 – Real estate, employment, claims, sourcing, etc.
Before ELM apps, companies used distinct tools for each task mentioned above and aggregated data in one place for reporting or decision making. However, with legal department solutions, company stakeholders and CEOs may quickly access everything from one secure software at any time and location.
What Problems Do ELM Solutions Address?
1 – Managing legal matters like case details, documents, inventory, and legal suit statuses might be difficult without a specialized app, but ELM makes it simple and cost-effective.
2 – Supervising legal spending necessitates the business of a whole department to set in-house counsel costs, third-party counsel charges, timekeeping, invoicing, and so on. However, by installing an enterprise legal management app, you may reduce the cost of a whole department.
3 – Unlike a paralegal, an ELM app will provide a report you can submit to investors in a matter of minutes. It may also pull data from third-party apps such as Power BI, Tableau, Excel, ODATA, and others.
4 – Management and storing legal documents, templates, contracts, signatures, and so on is difficult work. On the other hand, modern ELM tools make it simple via digitalization, online viewing, eSignatures, online approval, and artificial intelligence (AI)-based analysis.
5 – Legal procedures rely heavily on past case references and law studies. ELM allows you to automate and improve your research work by using templates, checklists, best practices clause libraries, estimating the performance of legal cases, and so on.
6 – ELMs also provide compliance enforcement, monitoring, and an enterprise code of conduct, allowing you to rapidly establish the ground rules without spending much time in policy development. Environmental, governance, social, ethical, privacy, and business rules are all accessible via a unified app.
7 – Obtaining and protecting patents, trademarks, copyrights, innovations, unique ideas, and so on is one of the most difficult issues that enterprises confront. An ELM tool will assist you in capturing ideas, conducting research, writing IP patent filings and licenses, and claiming royalties.
The following are some prominent ELM tools that might assist your company’s legal team:
10+ Best Enterprise Legal Management (ELM) Solutions 2022
Enterprise Legal Management (ELM) Solutions you can use in 2022.
1. doeLEGAL
doeLEGAL is a prominent supplier of ELM, eDiscovery solutions, litigation support services, business innovation software, and IP management tools. It delivers enterprise-level legal department solutions under the brand name Ascent ELM. It has a slew of ELM features, including:
1 – Digitized legal matter management is available to anybody with the necessary credentials.
2 – It automates the legal billing process via the use of tools such as the Uniform Task-Based Management System (UTBMS) and the Legal Electronic Data Exchange Standard (LEDES) (LEDES).
3 – Legal hold management via schedules, emails, notifications, custodian communications, etc.
The Ascent ELM system’s only objective is to streamline enterprise legal processes and minimize costs to boost your cost profit margin.
2. Plexus Gateway
Plexus Gateway is an effortless ELM solution for expanding risk management across several organizations and groups in your enterprise-level business. The tool uses various automation technologies to transform your manual administrative and legal processes into completely automated ones. Contract Management, Contract Automation, and Matter Management are the three main elements of the ELM tool. As a result, your internal risk, compliance, and the legal team may decrease administrative load and concentrate more on things that matter, such as quicker risk guidelines implementation, everyone adhering to compliance standards, and so on.
3. Outlaw
Do you often encounter contract bottlenecks? Consider Outlaw! Its superior contract lifecycle management (CLM) tool makes it effortless to create smarter deal processes. You may also rapidly complete such trades or legal contracts. It has extensive capabilities such as automated legal contract procedures, dynamic template development, and integrated editing. There is no need to wait weeks before launching a new contract. It’s just a matter of hours with Outlaw. Its unique contract creation system allows you to set conditional logic templates without writing a single line of code. The writing engine also supports AI-enabled contract searches, third-party papers, automated workflow flexibility, and contract document tracking. The tool may be integrated with most business apps such as Hubspot, Salesforce, Microsoft 365, SharePoint, QuickBooks, Adobe Sign, Slack, and others.
4. Checkbox
If your in-house legal team is striving to simplify and automate legal operations, Checkbox is a must-try. It is a no-code, drag-and-drop workflow builder designed specifically for legal procedures. It radically transforms your legal department’s operations by enhancing productivity and efficiency, which you can witness with your own eyes. Apps that are ready to use right out of the box:
1 – A self-service and user-friendly document generation tool.
2 – Complete legal document and contract process automation.
3 – Use automated web forms to gather data from many collaborators.
4 – Digitize expert procedures and knowledge to automate decision-making.
5 – File management app for recording and updating data.
You may create apps for legal cases, risk management, and compliance enforcement tasks. You don’t need to go through programming or coding school or spend hours discussing intricate legal procedures with an IT professional.
5. Bodhala
If you’re spending a lot of money on outside legal counsel affecting your company’s income, stop now and try Bodhala. It integrates machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), and market intelligence data to assist the corporate legal team and stakeholders make better choices while saving money. You may, for example, take advantage of its Benchmarking Solutions, which gives comprehensive cost analysis for various outside legal firms for certain litigation that you must handle. In addition, the Comparative Analytics tool gives unrivaled data on hours, cost, staffing, documentation, and tasks related to particular legal matters.
6. SimpleLegal
SimpleLegal is an intelligent, intuitive, scalable, and simple-to-use cloud tool overseeing all enterprise legal management aspects. Its primary systems are as follows:
1 – An e-billing module comprehensively views all financials and monitors legal spending and future project needs.
2 – Because case matters are at the core of this tool, a specialized Matter Management module is used to track all external and internal legal concerns.
3 – A Vendor Management tool for monitoring external suppliers and increasing their productivity while enforcing data privacy standards.
4 – A sophisticated Reporting and Analytics tool with dashboards and strategic action recommendations are also available.
Many legal departments consider SimpleLegal to be one of the best solutions.
7. LawVu
LawVu is a well-known brand regarding an effective legal workspace for ELM. With a consolidated collection of legal tools, the LawVu workspace is a one-stop shop for all things legal. The tools include productivity and collaboration technologies designed specifically for enterprise-level in-house legal counsel teams. It is a safe, encrypted, and constantly linked cloud-based software, allowing legal specialists to handle legal contracts, legal-matter expenses, litigation matters, data reporting, and knowledgebases. In addition, the tool prevents you from feeling alienated from other business apps. You may work comfortably using third-party data sharing tools such as Workshare, Slack, Okta, Microsoft 365, Teams, DocuSign, Gmail, and others.
8. Ironclad
An Ironclad is a cloud-based tool that helps businesses automate, create, and manage legal process processes associated with agreements and contracts. It includes a self-service platform that allows business and legal professionals to edit or develop templates easily and swiftly construct contracts. Among its prominent features are red-line previewing, an audit trail, searchable contract data, automatic signings, and a contracts workflow engine. It allows enterprise-level businesses to analyze legal agreements and contracts anonymously. External and internal parties may work together to approve contracts and analyze audit trails to track mistakes, missing components, and so on for modifications. Finally, the tool has standard metadata connections for Dropbox, DocuSign, HelloSign, Google Drive, Adobe Sign, Egnyte, and other services.
9. Brightflag
Brightflag is an AI-driven ELM, and legal department solution that streamlines all legal activities your business may wish to handle with an in-house legal team. This cloud-based app allows in-house legal teams to track and document all legal matters, whether budgeting, service requests, or forecasts. Not only that, but In the same Brightflag user interface, they may also control and manage legal spending (UI). It also contains an ever-evolving AI engine that can scan and gather interesting data from legal documents, affidavits, forms, etc.
10. BRYTER
BRYTER assists you in meaningfully transforming your corporate legal services workflow such that it seems to be a self-service project with auto-pilot mode rather than a group of individuals operating it. It is the ideal solution for tailoring the legal process tool to your business’s demands. As a result, you save time on technical support follow-ups. BRYTER takes a toolkit-based approach to enterprise legal management, with key features such as automatic legal processes, automated document approvals, enterprise-grade security, API connection, and data analytics.
11. ContractPodAi
ContractPodAi’s online app provides corporate non-legal and legal users with total visibility, control, and command over the enterprise’s legal process. It is the only ELM solution that allows you to control many legal matters at once and can handle practically any court challenge. The cloud solution, which encompasses all legal processes, offers enhanced tools and self-service resources to automate legal practitioners’ configuring, creating, and automating most legal documents. Business process management (BPM), a smart repository, powerful analytics, a vendor negotiating site, and other features are also significant.
12. Mitratech
Mitratech began as an on-premise legal management system many years ago. In 2002, the legal software solutions development company started delivering full-service enterprise legal management tools for midsized and enterprise-level enterprises. In a word, it is an end-to-end legal management tool designed for you to satisfy your business’s unique legal process requirements. The full ELM solution comprises four programming modules: Collaborati, TAP Workflow Automation, TeamConnect, and Acuity ELM.
Wrapping Up:
Your organization’s enterprise legal management approach will always be unique. As a result, you want a tailored ELM solution that focuses on current problems and previous difficulties that you anticipate may arise. In the preceding sections, we have included some of the best ELM tools used worldwide by leaders in enterprise-level businesses. In addition, you may consult with your legal counsel or the legal department to determine the best solution for your company.
