The legal technology company Apperio is today unveiling enhancements to its legal spend management software for corporate legal departments that include options for individuals within a department – including allied professionals and finance staff – to personalize and customize their view of company legal spend data.
It is also introducing another new feature, Matter Files, that enables users to attach key documents – such as an engagement letter or record of instruction – to a matter tracked in the system.
Read more about Apperio on the LawNext Legal Tech Directory.
Personalization is provided through new dashboard templates designed for legal operations and finance teams. Templates enable users to get a view of the data that meets their particular needs. This curation is particularly helpful to users, Apperio says, because legal spend management systems contain large amounts of data with many different uses – and can feel overwhelming at first.
Apperio said it designed the templates based on best practices it observed in collaborating with customers and legal departments. The templates add to the options for personalizing the dashboard view that the company unveiled in late 2021, including a “bird’s eye” view of legal spend for GCs and CLOs and a “matter view” for staff lawyers managing legal projects.
Customization is enabled through 17 new “widgets” – data points and charts customers can choose from, to see legal spend data from different vantage points. Customers can use these widgets to build their dashboard view from scratch, or customize an existing template to their liking, Apperio says. Each widget can be further tailored by configuring how they display data.
“Our new features are the result of behind-the-scenes work with many legal departments over time and across industries,” says Apperio founder and CEO Nicholas d’Adhemar. “That collaboration enables us to listen to our customers and to spot both best practices and unmet needs – and bake what we’ve learned into the software to ultimately provide more value to customers.”
Widgets for Customization
Examples of the new widgets include:
- Matters over budget. This widget shows the top matters that are over budget. It can be configured to show the top matters across all law firms or just specific law firms. The purpose is to help the legal department optimize the allocation of work, bring spending under control and manage cost forecasts, Apperio says.
- Aged unbilled. This shows the total work in progress across a business, broken down over selected time periods. It can also be filtered to show only the WIP for all firms or just certain firms. The purpose is to allow customers to identify the time that has yet to be invoiced and keep track of accruals related to specific forecasting periods, allowing companies to manage billing cycles more predictably.
- Dormant matters. This widget allows legal departments to see matters that have had no activity for six months or more, yet which remain open and potentially forgotten. The purpose is to help the legal department close dormant matters and predict potential invoices for any remaining unbilled WIP.
Apperio previously rolled out client-centric dashboards that let outside counsel obtain the same view of legal spending their clients have. There are more than 200 global law firms connected to the Apperio platform currently, the company says.
Attaching Key Documents
Also today, Apperio is announcing a new feature called Matter Files, which allows users to attach key documents to a matter tracked in the system. The idea, Apperio says, is to make it easier for customers to reference documents governing the scope of a matter when following progress or monitoring spend.
Apperio says realized the need for this from its customers in legal operations. Although they require the ability to cross-reference letters of engagement throughout a matter’s lifecycle, the documents are not always easy to track down. This new feature addresses that problem, Apperio says.
Related LawNext Podcast: In Defense of the Billable Hour: A LawNext Interview with Apperio CEO Nicholas d’Adhemar.
