Nicolas PINOT, R&D engineer, LEGAL SUITE: “The challenge Legal Suite has was to provide Societe Generale’s corporate counsels with a solution that was both detailed and user friendly. The application had to offer them a detailed view of their billable activity in order to improve the management of the group’s costs.”
Societe Generale improves the management of their legal activity. The law is present in all aspects of the banking sector. As the years pass, managing legal activity has become complex and the risks have become more important.
Societe Generale wanted to re-organize the manner in which they were keeping track of their legal team’s billable hours. The company wanted software that would add up the time spend by their legal team while at the same time entering the costs in the internal billing system, much like a legal firm does for his clients. The need for a powerful and adapted tool became even more important once the regulatory constraints became more significant (requirements linked to Bale II). According to Societe Generale, it is crucial to choose an application that offers immediate access via the intranet, a large capability to configure and a powerful ability to calculate.
From a methodological point of view, it was initially necessary to distinguish the billable activities from those which are not in order to measure the workload generated by each of them. The legal director then calculated the cost associated to each lawyer according to his sector of competence and the type of work he does. It is important to mention that time spent is calculated by service within the legal department and not individually by lawyer. This was crucial to prevent this solution as being perceived as an intrusive tool implemented to measure individual performance.
The legal department implemented their Legal Suite solution called “SIM” (Informatical Management System) in 2004 which is accessible to their 220 legal counsels via the intranet. They divided their legal costs in three categories (one per major sector of activity) and based their billing on these categories. Their clients receive a detailed invoice which includes a list of files dealt with and the global costs per department.
One other major advantage of the SIM system is that it takes into account every aspect of a file. Each department head validates every week the time spent by his or her team on each file, after which the application sums up all the entries and remembers only the time spent per team. “For us the decision to implement the Legal Suite was an excellent one. After taking into account its success in managing legal matters we have now made the application available to our insurance brokers and tax consultants.”
For purposes of this website, all quotations have been translated into the English language