Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) faced a common challenge for corporate law departments—a lack of visibility into the activities of its legal staff. When confronted with a large-scale corporate separation, HPE needed the ability to determine whether legal staff were working predominately on client-facing or corporate assignments on a per-employee basis.
The company also needed a way to easily cross-reference time, project and billing rate data without requiring a great deal of manual, labor-intensive effort by staff.
While navigating a corporate separation, HPE enlisted Harbor to assist in identifying its law department staff’s time-per-task allocations. Harbor’s enterprise legal analytics software, CounselCommand, was implemented to provide HPE with the ability to view and analyze employee time logs from a central location, paving the way for data-driven transformation.
By consolidating all of our data into CounselCommand, we identified inefficiencies and reduced costs within a matter of weeks. After our corporate separation, we unanimously decided to keep using the platform. Eighteen months later, we receive actionable intelligence from the system regularly. Molly Tynan Perry, Chief Operating Officer, Office of the General Counsel at Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Identifying data sources
Harbor’s experienced Services team worked closely with HPE to identify all available sources of legal department data. Harbor then implemented CounselCommand—an enterprise legal analytics solution—to serve as a single system to connect and provide reporting on various data, including employee time, project and billing data, contract management, intellectual property and compliance. This allowed HPE to easily access actionable and accurate data that could be presented intuitively to stakeholders.
Three key objectives
To give HPE better insight into its resource allocation and legal spending, Harbor focused on three key areas.
Tracking legal staff time against projects
Previously, the law department had little visibility into how employees spent their time. This blind spot made it immensely difficult to determine which of the two newly separated organizations employees should belong to. Particularly with many staff splitting time between internal and external projects, the company needed exact data to understand who was predominantly corporate or client-facing. By pulling employee time data into CounselCommand, Harbor helped HPE delineate the best team structure for future success.
Integrate disparate data sources
Historically, highly fragmented data exposed the law department to less efficient processes and wasted time spent on repetitive manual tasks. Most law department analysis was performed via Excel, and was very time-and labor-intensive.
By aggregating a multitude of data sources into CounselCommand, HPE has easy access to real-time reporting on law department work allocation and visibility into potential bottlenecks. This allows internal staff to identify complex data patterns and trends without relying on a costly and often scarce resource, such as a business intelligence analyst.
Provide a platform that can accommodate current and future needs
Beyond HPE’s immediate concerns about addressing staffing after the corporate separation, the law department wanted to streamline data gathering, analyzing and reporting processes. By moving away from manual data and trend analysis, HPE can more easily pinpoint and act on opportunities to increase efficiency and boost margins in the corporate law department.
Unified data results in reduced costs
Rather than manually pulling data from multiple different standalone systems, HPE can now access all of its relevant information from a single dashboard, making analysis and reporting easy and efficient.
Beyond freeing up the law department’s time, CounselCommand provides tangible business results to HPE. With an immediate view into employee time and project use, the law department reduced the cost of a key service by 30 percent within a few weeks.
Better project-based value analysis allows the law department to distinguish between high and low-value tasks more precisely. As a result, the company can outsource low-value responsibilities to external partners at a reduced cost while prioritizing higher-value work in-house. This allows the law department to accept more business and frees employees from less engaging, non-critical activities.
About HPE
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPE) is the global edge-to-cloud company that helps organizations accelerate outcomes by unlocking value from all of their data, everywhere. Built on decades of reimagining the future and innovating to advance the way people live and work, HPE delivers unique, open, and intelligent technology solutions as a service. For more information, visit: www.hpe.com.
This engagement was executed by HBR Consulting, one of the companies that merged to form Harbor.
- CounselCommand
- Data integration
- Resource optimization
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