Fir Tree Partners’ legal and compliance department is a lean team, but the company engages more than 20 outside law firms and maintains a relatively large budget for outside counsel. Fir Tree leadership wanted to look closer at its spending on outside counsel and objectively evaluate its legal operations practices and workflows related to vendor billing management.
At that time, roughly one-half of Fir Tree’s outside law firms were global “Big Law” firms, and the other half boutique firms. Six global law firms accounted for approximately 80 percent of Fir Tree’s total spending on outside counsel.
With Harbor, we have a smart partner who can guide us with a level of expertise in corporate legal operations that is truly exceptional. Brian Meyer, General Counsel at Fir Tree
Manual processes with no value-add
“It became clear to us that our legacy process for reviewing and processing law firm invoices was tedious, highly manual and failed to deliver any useful data we could review to manage our spending better,” says Brian Meyer, General Counsel of Fir Tree Partners. “We knew that we needed to leverage technology to achieve greater efficiencies in how we processed bills and to measure our spending with greater precision to create a best-in-class legal operations function to drive true value for the business.”
Fir Tree’s legal group set out to identify a software product they could deploy that would help them reach their goals.
While attending the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) Institute, Meyer was introduced to a software tool that immediately captured his interest: Harbor’s CounselCommand, an enterprise legal analytics solution.
Leveraging data for deeper insights
CounselCommand was developed by a team of Harbor experts with decades of experience working with corporate law departments and law firms on their most pressing operational challenges. The product was created to help corporate law departments contain costs and accurately respond to questions about their department’s strategy and operations. CounselCommand delivers powerful visual analytics that showcases the story behind the data to empower more strategic decision-making across the entire corporate law department, from internal operations and department budgeting to outside counsel performance and e-discovery spending.
“We were intrigued by CounselCommand right away because it was obvious to us that the developers had given a lot of thought to how the software could harvest unprocessed law firm billing data to surface value-added insights into spending patterns,” says Meyer. “It does this with simple dashboard displays powered by sophisticated data analytics.”
Meyer and John Ringwood, Deputy General Counsel of Fir Tree Partners, tested the product and concluded it was intelligent and well-suited for the department’s unique needs.
Spend visibility and deeper analytics
Meyer and Ringwood point to five primary benefits they have realized as a result of their deployment of CounselCommand at Fir Tree Partners:
- Optimize spending: Fir Tree can now review, process and pay law firm invoices within 30 days of their submission. This newfound efficiency has enabled the company to negotiate 'Rapid Pay' discounts with some law firms, saving Fir Tree a substantial amount of money. In addition, the legal team can now review detailed analytics regarding the company’s historical spending with each of its outside law firms. This has equipped them to negotiate rate reductions with select firms based on the volume of work Fir Tree has allocated to them in recent years and expects to deliver in the future.
- Law firm performance: CounselCommand has given the firm deeper visibility into how its outside counsel has performed, including insights related to staffing levels and billing practices, says Meyer. “This allows us to generate a quarterly ‘Vendor Scorecard’ for each law firm and discuss ways to achieve greater efficiencies with them. It also provides valuable data to guide our efforts to drive change in our internal legal operations.”
- High-value business counsel: One of Fir Tree’s goals is to add value to its core business functions by providing high-level strategic business counsel, says Meyer. “CounselCommand has allowed us to apply sophisticated analytics to law firm billing management and to manage our outside counsel relationships more effectively. We can redirect some of that energy into important value-added initiatives that help drive the business forward.”
- Diversity and inclusion: One of Fir Tree’s core values is increasing opportunities for all people, so its outside law firms must build more diverse and inclusive teams. Harbor’s CounselCommand enables Meyer to track law firm diversity statistics and identify which firms need to be encouraged to increase their efforts to attract and retain diverse talent.
- Partnership with Harbor: Meyer says that a real bonus of selecting CounselCommand is the knowledge that Fir Tree’s enterprise legal analytics solution is backed by some of the brightest minds in the industry. “With Harbor, we have a smart partner who can guide us with a level of expertise in corporate legal operations that is truly exceptional.”
About Fir Tree Partners
Fir Tree Partners is a New York-based hedge fund that invests worldwide in public and private sector companies, real estate and sovereign debt. Founded in 1994, Fir Tree manages approximately $5 billion of assets on behalf of leading endowments, foundations, pension funds and sovereign wealth funds.
This engagement was executed by HBR Consulting, one of the companies that merged to form Harbor.
- Cost & spend management
- CounselCommand
- Diversity
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