Wolters Kluwer has launched LegalCollaborator, a competitive bidding feature using templates that builds upon its Total Legal Spend Management system to ‘capture law firm engagement information and competitive pricing insights’ and help ‘enforcement of pricing agreements for full vendor transparency and cost management’.
The solution also integrates seamlessly with ELM Solutions’ TyMetrix 360 and Passport platforms, they added.
All well and good, but what does it do?
LegalCollaborator, the company explained, ‘removes subjectivity from law firm selection, providing a series of pre-defined templates that allow users to efficiently collect and view critical matter details such as conflict waivers, strategy, staffing and pricing structure side-by-side’.
In short, they’ve borrowed from the great book of standardisation, at least with respect to legal spend data.
Also, a user-friendly interface will provide corporate legal teams with more transparency into their matters, driving an improved ability to ‘accomplish the desired outcome at the best possible cost’.
Meanwhile external lawyers can use the solution to demonstrate ‘the unique strategies and crucial differentiators paramount to successful matter outcomes’.
Overall, this will generate ‘a more competitive bidding environment that brings only the best firms to the top’ the company suggested.
Raja Sengupta, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions, commented: ‘Our combination of deep domain knowledge, insights mined from industry’s deepest and broadest datasets and comprehensive enterprise legal management software help legal professionals to maximize value in every phase of their engagements.’
Is this a big deal? It certainly helps with pricing transparency and also helps clients to ‘build a market’ as it were, because they can compare like with like via the template approach. And that’s got to be a good thing, and which will also support fixed fees – which in turn will be essential if we’re to move to a more transformative approach to the use of AI and automation.
In short: this is helpful.