Challenge
As a Fortune 500 multinational medical device manufacturer reflected on its past, and thinking about where it wanted to go, it sought a partner to help push the envelope for them. However, legal and compliance leadership did not have the ability to expand its current budget, but understood the impact transformation and new ways of working could have on its business and business partners. The challenge was to come up with a roadmap to self-fund the initiatives it wanted without making any sacrifices.
“The UnitedLex Spend Assessment and the path to savings was the foundation for us to experiment and push the envelope where we wanted our transformation journey to go.”
Solution
UnitedLex performed a spend assessment on nearly two-years of legal spend data that covered approximately $140M of annual external spend. Ultimately, an external spend governance program was designed to capture real cost-savings totaling $5.8M in year 1, by engaging in the following activities:
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Updating Billing Guidelines. Based on a benchmarking exercise, UnitedLex redrafted the billing guidelines, and managed the communication plan with third-party providers and external counsel.
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Enhancing Invoice Review. Conducted a fully enhanced and enabled invoice review program based on a defined enforcement protocol. This also included leveraging exceptions tracking and served as the foundation and supporting effort for all the downstream and related initiatives.
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Introducing a “Ways We Work” Program. This rethought how work was divided amongst internal and external resources and ensured the right work went to the right resource at the right time.
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Leveraging Scorecards and Provider Benchmarking. Started by introducing a data cleansing effort to represent actual behaviors. Thereafter scorecards and benchmarking data were used to assess the effectiveness of the representation, and better enable supervising attorneys to manage matters more effectively.
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Designing Strategic Panel. Worked to design and redefine a limited set of strategic partners in both the outside counsel and professional services space to enable volume-based purchasing and influence that drove client efficiency.
Impact
The client achieved over $5.8M in actual cost-savings—not avoidance—in Year 1, and was able to launch several transformation initiatives through this funding that included:
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Enterprise Legal Services Request Platform Implementation
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eDiscovery SaaS Purchase
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Intellectual Property Transformation Program that included launching the following:
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IP Monetization Program
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Patent Preparation & Prosecution Program
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Commercial Contracting
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Blueprinting Exercise for Future State Development of Centers of Excellence
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