Counself Review

Problem #1: Information Gathering

A member of Legal Ops, Emily from XYZ Corp needs to do her quarterly Compliance OC Due Diligence check. She identifies the 10 firms, whom she needs to reach out to for insurance, certification, and policy collection, and the teams of contacts she will need to get in touch with. In the past, this would all be handled through emails, Excel files, and PDFs, with endless communication chains and countless documents in all kinds of formats that had to be kept track of.

With Counself, Emily can keep track of all of her firms, their expiring documentation and when it’s time for a re-approval, and centralize the whole process for her team and her firm’s team. Instead of writing email after email, she can send out an RFI in Counself to all 10 vendors at once and the system will keep track of collecting information, sending reminders, and more, all while centralizing the process in a coordination hub. Outside Counsel and Vendors will receive emails with a secure link to Counself, so they can upload documents, answer questions, complete forms, ask for clarification, and more. Documents can also be added to responses with conditions, such as view only (no download), or disappearing after a predefined time, which keeps information secure while lowering your liability.

Problem #2: Proposal Requests

A new litigation matter has made its way into XYZ Corp’s Legal Department and is based in Alaska. XYZ is based in Texas, but the Associate General Counsel has a few contacts from Law School at firms in Anchorage. Normally, the AGC would just reach out to his buddies, but instead of just taking a risk and sending out the matter details to just their one or two contacts, the legal team has been offered to contact their corporate procurement team to use their enterprise vendor tool (ex: Ariba) for issuing an RFP. However, due to the urgency of the case and unfamiliarity of both the legal and the procurement departments about the practice of sending out RFPs for legal matters, such as the required technology and time needed to issue and track RFP, they simply gave up on the idea.

With Counself though, XYZ’s legal staff can create an Outside Counsel oriented RFP in a matter of minutes. With the integration of their Matter Management System, RFP information will be pulled in from the corresponding matter. All that’s left to do is to detail specific matter information, goals, and objectives, and to attach any pre-defined questionnaires. No need to worry about email chains, folder structures, and buried clarifications. Each of your recipient firms will get a private opportunity to respond, while you can just sit back, review, assess, and select the firm best fit for the job.

Problem #3: Request for Quotation

XYZ Corp has a group of approved panel firms. They have sent out their RFIs to do their due diligence and risk mitigation, have included these firms on RFPs and found consistently they are performing well, bringing in wins, and keeping costs low. You have another case in Anchorage and know that one of the firms you sent an RFP out to last time on a similar case did a great job. Send a quick Request for Quotation to see if your suspicions were correct about this firm and whether they’ll be the right fit for this project. You can attach all of the same tools as a regular RFP, from questionnaires to documents, but at the end of the day, sending an RFQ through Counself is quick, easy, and auditable.

Problem #4: Contract

Emily from XYZ Corp found out that the current NDA signed with 3 of the law firms has expired this last year. This is a risk issue and must be addressed ASAP. Emily uses Counself to issue the standard NDA using DocuSign and prepopulating defined & relationship fields with the information she’s already tracking.