How Intapp helps your law firm embrace the opportunity OCGs present
Effectively representing your clients is only one part of a winning strategy for client retention. Your firm must also meet clients’ expectations around billing, staffing, and other issues. Thankfully, your clients share their requirements around these issues in the outside counsel guidelines (OCGs) they provide.
Below we look at several ways in which OCGs provide a roadmap for a successful client relationship — and how your lawyers and business service professionals can most effectively follow this map.
OCGs signal what’s most important to a client
OCGs give your firm insight into your clients’ wishes and concerns regarding billing, data storage and privacy, conflicts of interest, AI, diversity, and other issues.
To underscore that your legal professionals respect the client’s preferences, when your law firm first receives a client’s OCGs or any updates to them, your partner can schedule a call with the client to discuss their guidelines.
To prepare for the call, your partner can rely on Intapp Terms to categorize and centrally store the terms. If the client has submitted an update of the OCGs, Intapp Terms can also compare the original OCGs to the update and highlight what terms are new or have changed.
With this information at the partner’s fingertips during the call, the partner can demonstrate quick facility with the client’s terms and ask clarifying questions, showing the client a sincere willingness to honor their preferences.
OCGs enable you to avoid rejected bills
Who doesn’t want frictionless billing, in which you submit bills that are quickly accepted and paid? You can achieve this ideal state when all your professionals comply with a client’s billing terms.
Such compliance is made easier with Intapp Terms, which stores and surfaces client billing terms to timekeepers and billing staff, guiding them as they enter time and review prebills in Intapp Time and Intapp Billstream.
OCGs help you align all operations around client expectations
To fully comply with client requirements, your firm must ensure that one client’s OCGs don’t conflict with other clients’ terms or vendor contracts.
For example, if a vendor’s proposed contract provides notification of a data breach within 48 hours, but your client requires notice within 24 hours, this is the kind of terms conflict you would want to uncover before entering into an agreement with either the vendor or client.
Intapp Terms allows your professionals to see same-screen comparisons of different contracts and guidelines, making it easier to identify conflicting provisions. Once you’ve identified a potential conflict, you can negotiate with one of the parties to align their terms with other obligations.
OCGs, combined with Intapp Terms, enable effective client service
While OCGs are sometimes viewed as overly prescriptive, their details in fact make it easier to know what to do to meet a client’s expectations — increasing your chances of retaining the client for future legal work.
It’s only when a law firm doesn’t have a system in place for storing and surfacing terms that their details become a liability with many costs.
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