Enterprise legal management (ELM) is the software that a company's legal department uses to track all its legal work, the outside law firms it hires and the bills that those firms send. It is also called matter management software. Its main buyer is the legal operations team, the team that runs the legal department's budgets, software and processes.
ELM is built around the matter. A matter is one piece of legal work, such as one lawsuit, one deal, one regulator's notice or one investigation. Every matter gets a record. The record holds the court or the authority, the next date, the law firm handling it, the documents, the budget, the money spent so far and the amount at stake.
Consider a vehicle-loan company in Chennai. Its legal department has 12 in-house lawyers and about 6,000 open matters. Most of them are recovery cases against borrowers who stopped paying their EMIs. Others are consumer complaints, disputes over repossessed vehicles and cases about branch office leases. The cases are heard in courts across 18 states, and about 70 outside law firms and advocates handle them.
Before ELM, each regional office kept its cases in a spreadsheet. A missed hearing date could mean that the court decided the case without hearing the company. With ELM, each outside advocate updates the matter after every hearing: what happened, and the next date. Seven days before each hearing, ELM reminds the lawyer in charge.
ELM also handles the money. Each firm uploads its invoices into ELM. A firm that bills by the hour sends its time entries, which its own law practice management software has recorded, and the way of charging is explained in billable hours. ELM checks each invoice line against the company's billing rules, a job described in legal spend management. Approved invoices go to accounts payable automation for payment.
Two more jobs sit in ELM. When the company expects to be sued, ELM sends a legal hold notice that tells the right employees to keep every relevant document. ELM also links to the company's contracts in CLM, so that a dispute can be opened from the contract it concerns. At the end of each quarter, ELM gives the finance team a list of cases that the company might lose, with the amounts. Auditors ask for this list, and the risk team adds it to the GRC platform.
How is ELM different from law practice management software? They sit on the two sides of the same bill. The law firm uses practice management software to record its time and send the bill. The company's legal department uses ELM to receive and check that bill.