The management of commitments made to clients — via standard engagement letters, outside counsel guidelines, billing guidelines, etc. — is one of the key areas of law firm risk management. One of the most important aspects of managing these commitments is to ensure that they are reviewed and approved by key subject-matter experts (SMEs) and stakeholders from different areas in the firm.
Intapp Research
The Intapp Risk Staffing Survey found that responsibility for client terms review spans a wide range of functional areas within firms, with more than half of respondents reporting that general counsel, conflicts and risk lawyers, IT, and accounting are all involved in the process. Additionally, just shy of 50% of respondents report that finance team members and partners are involved, and other functional areas — including HR, information governance, marketing, and data privacy — also play a role.
Challenges Managing Client Commitments
This presents challenges as firms may store client guidelines in paper files or siloed information systems and have no way to circulate the documents to ensure that all the right people read and sign-off on them. In addition, there may be little, or no automated process set up to notify lawyers and staff when client guidelines need to be reviewed.
Introducing Intapp Terms Workflow
With Intapp Terms you can ensure that all the right people in your organization review and approve relevant client guidelines. Terms enables you to streamline and automate review, approval, and negotiation of client guidelines with workflow that supports your specific processes. In addition, automatic notifications inform key subject-matter experts and prompt them to respond via email or within Terms.
Intapp Terms Review and Approval Workflow: Key Features and Benefits
- Streamline, automate, and track your end-to-end terms review and approval process
- Create flexible workflow that supports your specific review and approval processes
- Ensure all terms are properly stored, reviewed, and assigned to the right SMEs for feedback
- Leverage automatic notifications to ensure that key SMEs review terms and remain informed throughout the process
- Enable SMEs to respond promptly via email or within Intapp Terms to review and provide feedback
- Provide visibility and track review status during the process moves forward
- Use key internal feedback to negotiate with clients and finalize the approval process