12 Best Enterprise Legal Management (ELM) Solutions in 2022

Enterprise Legal Management or ELM ensures the internal legal team of big businesses is productive, transparent, accountable, efficient, and predictable while handling legal matters.

ELM solutions have been growing steadily since the 1990s, and by 2028 its market capitalization will exceed the 1 billion USD mark. ELM is the big thing for enterprise-level legal practices where companies manage in-house counsels to face legal challenges.

It utilizes the best and latest software technologies, databases, eDiscovery techniques, etc. Since billions of dollars are at stake in big lawsuits, companies need the best-in-class law personnel and tools.

If you are an enterprise-level business representative looking for the best ELM software for your organization, you have come to the right place. Alternatively, if you are a group of professionals with legal and software development experts who want to develop the next big ELM tool, we are here to inspire you with some state-of-the-art ELM solutions below.      

What Is Enterprise Legal Management (ELM)?

Big business corporations have their own in-house law departments. Enterprise legal management is the discipline of overseeing the administration, operation, strategies, responsibilities, and performance of such corporate law departments.

ELM is a branch of corporate management and, at the same time, represents a set of tasks like cost management for legal matters, legal e-billing, corporate budgeting, intellectual property (IP) management, securities management, overseeing finance process compliance, etc.

Now, modern-day software development technologies made it possible to build a robust application that can take care of all things legal for an enterprise-level organization. Consider the following tasks that come into the area of ELM: 

• Acquisitions and mergers
• Dispute settlements and litigations
• Product, service, business, or IP licensing
• Trademark management
• Compliance and governance via legal norms
• Real estate, claims, employment, sourcing, etc.

Before the ELM apps, companies used separate tools for each of the above tasks and then compiled data in one place for reporting or decision making. But, with the legal department solutions, company stakeholders and CEOs can easily access everything from one secure software anywhere anytime.         

What Challenges Does the ELM Solutions Solve?

#1. Managing legal matters like case details, documents, inventory, and statuses of the legal suits could be challenging without a dedicated app, but ELM makes it effortless and cost-effective. 

#2. Supervising legal spending requires a business to set up a whole department that tracks in-house counsel costs, third-party counsel expenses, timekeeping, billing, etc. But, you can cut down a complete department’s cost by deploying an enterprise legal management app.  

#3. While a paralegal takes days to produce a report that you can present to the investors, an ELM app will do that in a few minutes. It can also get data from third-party apps like Power BI, Tableau, Excel, ODATA, etc. 

#4. Management and safekeeping of legal documents, templates, contracts, signatures, etc., is a daunting task. However, the present-day ELM tools make it easy through digitization, online viewing, eSignatures, online approval, and artificial intelligence (AI)-based analysis.  

#5. Legal practices depend largely on previous case references and research of law books. ELM lets you automate and perfect the research work through templates, checklists, best practices, clause libraries, forecasting legal cases’ performance, etc.  

#6. ELMs also come with compliance enforcement, monitoring, and enterprise code of conduct, so you can easily lay the ground rules without investing much in deciding the policies. Environmental, governance, social, ethics, privacy, and corporate regulations are all available in one centralized application.  

#7. One of the greatest challenges enterprises face is properly obtaining and defending patents, trademarks, copyrights, inventions, novel ideas, etc. An ELM tool will assist you in idea capturing, researching, drafting IP patent filings, licensing, and royalty claiming.   

Here are some of the popular ELM tools that can help your enterprise’s legal team:

Plexus Gateway

Plexus Gateway is an effortless ELM solution for scaling up risk management across several entities and groups of your enterprise-level business. The tool employs various automation technologies to transform your manual administrative and legal process into a fully automatic one. 

The ELM tool has three core modules: Contract Management, Contract Automation, and Matter Management. Apart from these primary functionalities, here are some of the value-added features: 

• DocuSign integration
• Let an unlimited number of employees access the tool
• Automated and digitized internal approval workflows
• Collaborate with external parties securely
• Get detailed data analytics in a few clicks     

Your internal risk, compliance, and legal team can reduce administrative burden and focus more on stuff that matters like accelerated execution of risk guidelines, everybody following the compliance norms, etc.

doeLEGAL

doeLEGAL is a leading service provider for ELM, eDiscovery solutions, litigation support services, business innovation software, and IP management tools. Ascent ELM is the brand name under which doeLEGAL offers enterprise-level legal department solutions.

It comes with a host of ELM features like: 

• Digitized legal matter management is accessible for all who hold specific credentials
• It automates the legal billing process by employing systems like Uniform Task-Based Management System (UTBMS) and Legal Electronic Data Exchange Standard (LEDES).
• Legal hold management using schedules, emails, notifications, custodian communications, etc.   

The sole purpose of the Ascent ELM system is to simplify enterprise legal operations and reduce the cost to increase your business’s profit margin.

Checkbox

If your in-house legal team is struggling to streamline and automate the legal workflows, you must try out Checkbox. It is a drag-and-drop and no-code workflow builder exclusively for legal processes. It completely changes how your legal department works by increasing their productivity and efficiency, which you can see with naked eyes.

The apps that come out of the box and are ready to use: 

• Self-service and intuitive tool for document generation
• Complete automation for legal document and contract workflows
• Automated online forms to collect data from many collaborators
• Automate decision-making by digitizing expert processes and knowledge
• Data management app for recording and updating files

Moreover, you can build purpose-driven apps for legal cases, risk management, and compliance enforcement tasks. You do not even need to go through any programming or coding training or spend hours with an IT personnel explaining complex legal processes.

Outlaw

Do you face contract bottlenecks a lot? Try Outlaw! Its high-quality contract lifecycle management (CLM) tool makes it effortless to design smarter deal flows. Also, you can close those deals or legal contracts quickly. 

It comes with advanced features like automated legal contract workflows, dynamic template authoring, and built-in editing. Furthermore, you do not need to wait weeks to launch a new contract. With Outlaw, it is just a matter of hours. 

Its self-developed and novel contract authoring system lets you set conditional logic templates without writing a single line of code. The authoring engine also supports AI-enabled contract searching, third-party papers, automatic workflow adaptability, and contract document tracking.  

Moreover, you can integrate the tool with most business apps like Hubspot, Salesforce, Microsoft 365, SharePoint, QuickBooks, Adobe Sign, Slack, etc.

SimpleLegal

SimpleLegal is the intelligent, intuitive, scalable, and easy-to-operate cloud application to supervise everything about enterprise legal management. 

The core systems of SimpleLegal are: 

• An e-billing module to facilitate a complete visual of all financials, tracking legal spending, and forecasting future requirements.
• Case matters are at the heart of this tool, and hence it uses a dedicated Matter Management module to track all external and internal legal issues.
• A Vendor Management tool to supervise external vendors and make them more productive while enforcing data privacy policies.
• There is also a robust Reporting and Analytics tool that offers dashboards and strategic action suggestions.    

SimpleLegal is one of the most preferred solutions by a lot of legal departments.

Bodhala

If you are spending on outside legal counsel a lot and taking a hit on company revenue, stop there and try Bodhala. It combines machine learning (ML), AI, and market intelligence data to assist the corporate legal team and company stakeholders make superior decisions and saving money.

For example, you get to benefit from its Benchmarking Solutions that provide granular cost analysis for several outside law firms for a specific lawsuit that you need to handle. Additionally, the Comparative Analytics module provides unparalleled data on hours, cost, staffing, documentation, and tasks of specific legal matters.    

Ironclad

Ironclad is a cloud-based tool that assists businesses in automating, creating, and managing legal process workflows linked to agreements and contracts. It comes with a self-service platform for business and legal practitioners to customize or design templates effortlessly and build contracts quickly.

Its notable features are red-line previewing, audit trail, searchable contract records, automated signatures, and a contracts workflow engine. It enables enterprise-level businesses to review legal agreements and contracts anonymously. 

Moreover, external and internal parties can collaborate on contracts for approvals and investigate audit trails to track errors, missing items, etc., for revisions. Finally, the tool comes with standard integrations for Dropbox, DocuSign, HelloSign, Google Drive, Adobe Sign, Egnyte, etc., for pulling or pushing metadata.

LawVu

If you are looking for an efficient legal workspace for ELM, LawVu is a popular name. The LawVu workspace performs as a single source of all things legal with a centralized collection of legal tools. The tools include productivity and collaboration systems purpose-built for the enterprise-level in-house teams of legal counsels.

It is a secured, encrypted, and always connected cloud-based software that lets legal experts manage legal contracts, legal-matter spends, lawsuit matters, data reporting, and knowledgebases.

Moreover, the tool does not let you feel disconnected from other business apps. You can work confidently with third-party tools for data exchange like Workshare, Slack, Okta, Microsoft 365, Teams, DocuSign, Gmail, etc.  

BRYTER

BRYTER helps you transform your corporate legal services workflow in a meaningful way so that it looks more like a self-service project with auto-pilot mode rather than a bunch of people driving it. 

It is the perfect solution to tailormade the legal process tool according to your business needs from the very beginning. Thus, you do not waste time on technical support follow-ups.

BRYTER follows a toolkit-based approach for simplified enterprise legal management with essential features like automatic legal workflows, automated document approvals, enterprise-grade security, integration through APIs, and data analytics.   

Brightflag

Brightflag is an AI-driven ELM, and legal department solution that facilitates all legal operations your business may want to handle using an in-house legal team. Whether it is budgeting, service requests, or forecasting, this cloud-based app enables in-house legal departments to track and capture all legal matters. 

That’s not all! They can also control and manage legal spending in the same Brightflag user interface (UI). Furthermore, it has an ever-evolving AI engine that can scan and capture interesting data from legal items like documents, affidavits, forms, etc. 

Mitratech

Mitratech started as an on-premise legal management system various years. In 2002, the legal software solutions development company began offering full-service enterprise legal management tools for midsized and enterprise-level organizations.

It is a feature-packed tool however, some of the notable functionalities are:

• Contract (legal or non-legal) lifecycle management
• Legal matter management
• Legal workflow automation
• Spend management
• Corporate legal overview

In a nutshell, it is the end-to-end legal management tool developed for you to meet the customized legal procedural needs of your business. Four programming modules: 

Collaborati, TAP Workflow Automation, TeamConnect, and Acuity ELM form the complete ELM solution. 

ContractPodAi

ContractPodAi online app lets corporate non-legal and legal users have complete visibility, control, and command over the entire legal process of the enterprise. It is the one ELM solution that lets you handle multiple legal matters at any given moment and has the resources to control almost any judicial challenge.

Encompassing all legal workflows, the cloud solution provides advanced tools and self-service resources to help legal practitioners configure, create, and automate most legal documents. Other notable features are business process management (BPM), a smart repository, advanced analytics, a vendor negotiation portal, etc.

Final Words

Your company’s enterprise legal management strategy will always be different than the others. Hence, you need a tailormade ELM solution by focusing on the issues at hand and what were the past issues that you expect to surface in the future. 

In the above sections, we have lined up some top-notch ELM tools that global leaders in enterprise-level businesses use. You can sit with your legal counsel or the legal department to pick the solution that suits your business.

If you are a law firm or a group of law professionals serving small to medium businesses and out in the market for reliable software (legal tech) for law firms, check out our article.