February 27, 2025

legal tech legal spend elm law department law firm artificial intelligence legal analytics

This year marks my first trip back to Legalweek since 2019, and I’m curious to see how the conversation and messaging around legal technology has evolved in that time. 

One thing is certain: AI will be a dominant topic. Every vendor will have an AI pitch, including us at Elevate (but more on that later in this post…) 

We’ll likely also see the usual focus on core (essential, really) legal tech categories (i.e., contract management, spend management, intake, workflow automation, etc.), with discussions about them that can start to feel repetitive. We’ll also see a distinct focus on two types of platforms: 

• Lightweight legal ops platforms, often marketed as ‘legal operations management platforms,’ that are essentially scaled-down Enterprise Legal Management (ELM) tools. These typically bundle two or three-core solutions but lack the depth and flexibility of a full ELM system. 

• Full-suite ELM platforms that offer extensive configurability and customisation. These platforms promise broad functionality but often involve lengthy, complex implementations requiring significant time and resources to fully deploy. 

What’s missing? Discussion about what matters most — the bottom line of helping legal teams adopt software, drive measurable outcomes, and achieve lasting change. Tech is exciting, but the excitement rapidly fades if it doesn’t deliver real (i.e., tangible, meaningful, and lasting) results. 

Enter Elevate. We are bringing something unique to the table. 

Re-Introducing Elevate ELM 

The ongoing evolution of Elevate ELM has been so significant that it may seem like we’re introducing something new at Legalweek. In a sense, we are due to the plethora of deliberate, organic product developments combined with the strategic integration of our many recent acquisitions. 

Elevate ELM is unique as a comprehensive solution for corporate legal teams and law firms navigating the complexities of legal operations. It is a platform that integrates all crucial aspects of legal management into a single, user-friendly solution, optimised to streamline workflows, improve efficiency, and enable data-driven decision-making. 

Whether managing matters, contracts, legal spend, vendor relationships, or risk, Elevate ELM equips legal teams with the tools to focus on strategic priorities and deliver measurable value. It addresses four key areas of legal operations: 

• Workflow: Optimising intake and request management with structured workflows 

• Contracts: Managing pre- and post-execution contracts lifecycles and compliance 

• Spend: Enhancing eBilling and spend management for greater financial control 

• Vendors: Simplifying vendor sourcing, collaboration, and outside counsel management 

Notably, law organisations can just as easily start with any of these functionalities and then scale up or use Elevate ELM to optimise their entire process continuums. For example, while it includes eBilling and invoice management, Elevate ELM enhances the entire legal spend lifecycle, from request submission and vendor sourcing to matter creation, pre-bill review, invoice submission, and legal project management. This holistic approach reflects the insights we’ve gained working with both law departments and law firms to optimise spend and billing processes. 

Why Elevate ELM is Different 

Elevate ELM distinguishes itself in several important ways: 

1. Comprehensive – Elevate ELM provides a complete, end-to-end system for the entire range of law department needs, including legal intake, matter management, contract management, RFPs and vendor sourcing, eBilling, spend management, and reporting in a single solution.  
2. Fast to deploy – The design of Elevate ELM enables it to deliver immediate impact. 
3. Simple and intuitive – We prioritise usability over unnecessary complexity – powerful functionality and a streamlined and user-friendly experience without the burden of feature bloat. 
4. We are expert-led – Elevate isn’t just a software company; we are expert-led and bring decades of legal services and consulting experience working closely with in-house teams and law firms and a proven track record of delivering real value. 

We don’t just build software hoping it will make an impact—we build software knowing it will. And we deploy it in a way that ensures success. 

Beyond Software: The Key to ‘Real’ Transformation 

Many vendors simply assume that technology alone is the solution. My Elevate colleagues and I know from extensive experience that a human-in-the-loop approach —one that pairs technology with expert services — consistently delivers faster, more effective, and more sustainable results. Consequentially, Elevate ELM is more than just a platform; it is augmented by Elevate’s legal services and consulting teams to ensure organisations receive more than the right technology – namely, the expertise and support that are critical to achieving outcomes that matter. 

Our approach goes beyond deployment and implementation. In addition to providing essential support in training, change management, and impact measurement, we integrate our legal expertise with our technology to enhance critical tasks such as compliance, litigation management, contract and document review, legal bill review, and data breach response. As a result of this combination of advanced technology and hands-on legal expertise, organisations using Elevate ELM achieve not only efficiency but also operational and strategic value. 

Data-Driven Decision Making 

Despite the voluminous discussion of the importance of data-driven decision-making, many organisations lack centralised access to the data needed to generate meaningful insights and make informed choices. Without a comprehensive, connected view of legal operations, data remains siloed, limiting its impact. 

That’s why we designed Elevate ELM to ensure that key data points across the entire legal operations spectrum—including contracts, matters, requests, and spend—are captured, centralised, and fully reportable. Legal teams no longer have to waste time piecing together fragmented data; instead, they have real-time dashboards and reporting for full transparency and instant answers to critical questions. By providing structured, actionable data, Elevate ELM enables legal teams to move beyond data collection to actual data-driven decision-making, improving efficiency, accountability, and outcomes. 

Interoperability: Playing Nice with Other Systems 

The era of legal tech vendors pushing for one platform to rule them all is over. Legal teams no longer want to be locked into a single system; they need flexible, interoperable solutions that seamlessly integrate with existing workflows. Now more than ever, the mantra ‘meet users where they work’ is essential. 

Elevate ELM has integration and interoperability at its core. Our MS Word plugin brings contract review directly into lawyers’ workflows, eliminating the need to switch between platforms. We also provide seamless integrations with document management, AP, ERP, and practice management systems, including SAP, Oracle, and DocuSign. Our API-first approach ensures that Elevate ELM can be easily adapted to fit within any legal tech ecosystem rather than forcing organisations into rigid, all-in-one solutions. 

With the rise of generative automation and agentic AI, we are entering an era where workflow logic itself can be automated, making interoperability even more streamlined. In the coming months, we look forward to demonstrating how Elevate harnesses these advances to create even more efficient, intelligent, and connected legal operations. 

A Final Word on AI (To Stay ‘Trendy’) 

Rather than rushing to sprinkle some AI ‘fairy dust’ on Elevate ELM, we have taken a deliberate, customer-driven approach. We engaged in-depth with numerous customers to identify high-impact AI use cases, and a clear theme emerged: the need to improve the speed and accuracy of review tasks, such as contract and invoice review. 

We have therefore implemented large language models into Elevate ELM to address three key areas: 

• Reviewing contracts against playbooks, including suggesting provisions, summarising terms, and enabling chat-based querying 

• Automating invoice line-item review, flagging vague narratives, block billing, and non-compliant invoices 

• Performing bulk contract review and metadata extraction to enhance efficiency and accuracy 

These are only the beginning. We continue to assess new AI applications that enhance legal operations, selecting the right AI tool for each specific need rather than relying on a one-size-fits-all approach. 

While AI dominates the conversation, at Elevate, we’re far more focused on the flip side — namely, IA (Intelligent Automation). Rather than rushing to integrate LLMs to try to grab headlines, we believe intelligent automation is the real game-changer for legal operations. IA is about enhancing efficiency, accuracy, and decision-making by seamlessly integrating automation into workflows, ensuring technology delivers meaningful, sustainable impact rather than just hype. 

Looking ahead, we are excited to be at Legalweek New York on March 24–27 – come see us at booth #1324!