The legal market is transforming. The shift in power from the law firm to the general counsel is seeing a change in the behaviours of clients, which means now more than ever law firms need to look to the future. That future requires the finance function to become an integral piece of how firms deliver their services to clients.

What do we mean by this? Finance technology needs to allow the firm to be agile, to support the complex and varying fee arrangements clients are looking to secure, and to support clients wishing to engage with their law firms. As new ways of engaging with clients become more pervasive, however, it is essential the finance function provides the analysis and insight required not only for the firm to ensure fee arrangements are profitable, but also to enable improvements in the service and experience the firm offers its clients.

The delivery of the financial agility required for this is best supported by cloud technology, consistent access to the latest innovations and, most importantly, the influence firms can have over delivering functionality that supports their strategic goals. Without this agile approach, firms may find themselves adopting ever more complex, costly and convoluted processes to support clients.

There are many areas where law firms’ finance departments can leverage technology to improve their financial processes. One is a comprehensive financial management solution that provides highly automated financial processing, from sourcing and procurement to billing and collections, through to effective financial management control, cashflow management and real-time visibility into financial results. However, it’s the insight and financial performance management that we at Oracle believe is the key to raising the finance function to be a strategic function delivering real value and insight to the firm. 

Enterprise winner

As firms grow and evolve, a powerful and flexible enterprise structure will be key to the effectiveness of the financial teams. The Oracle global practice management system (GPMS) general ledger has multi-dimensional constructs, providing users with powerful analytics at the click of a button and the speed of thought. And this means finance teams become more strategically curious, interrogating and drilling into the financial data with a new expectation that the answers to their ad hoc questions will be instantly revealed. Importantly, Oracle GPMS also supports global operations and complies with international accounting standards.

In addition, a truly integrated back office needs to be able to collaborate easily and effectively with the firm. Oracle’s GPMS leverages Oracle Social Network as a powerful collaboration tool. This is a secure private network, with social tools designed to capture and preserve information flowing between people, applications, and business processes, tied directly to the data within the system. This is great for accelerating productivity and evolving processes.

Collaboration between finance and resource management is also critical. Resource managers have an overview of the utilisation requirements within the firm or practice area. They can harness the power of the Oracle GPMS cloud to analyse this demand, comparing capacity with demand and identifying surplus as well as shortfall. Resource managers can match and best fit resources to the most appropriate assignments thanks to visual oversights revolving between a number of different metrics – availability, location and travel preference, as well as competency-based skills required for the matter requested.

“Resource managers have an overview of the utilisation requirements within the firm or practice area. They can harness the power of the Oracle GPMS cloud to analyse this demand”

Planning horizons

Taking Oracle’s learning from other industries, particularly financial services, gives the quickest return on investment – and in our view the most strategically important improvement a firm can make is in the area of performance management. It is important to emphasise the connected nature of an enterprise planning and forecasting process.  Planning in both financial and operational scenarios needs to be addressed. Firms that are most successful at enterprise planning connect operational planners to the firm’s finance plans in a way that provides synergies for both of these sets of stakeholders. The cloud makes it more practical to extend planning around the firm. However, instead of having numerous disconnected plans, the Oracle solution allows you to ensure alignment and synergy across the planning spectrum. Meanwhile, performance management is enhanced with emerging technologies to deliver autonomous planning and forecasting and to enable prediction of the future financial position of the firm. Oracle GPMS delivers endless future possibilities for your firm.