A National Pharmaceutical Company with Complex Legal Operations
This national pharmaceutical organization with approximately 2,000 employees maintains both 503A compounding and 503B outsourcing operations and serves healthcare providers across the United States.
The company’s legal department manages complex operations spanning labor and employment, regulatory compliance, intellectual property, corporate matters, and data privacy. To streamline operations, the operations team led by Deputy General Counsel had invested in LawVu as their legal matter management and e-billing platform but recognized an opportunity to unlock significantly greater value.
However, the existing platform setup did not adequately reflect a legal department looking to expand, scale fast, receive actionable insights and more efficiently communicate with internal and external stakeholders: matter intake workflows needed configuration, spend tracking functionality remained inactive, and legal service provider management required systematic deployment. The team had a clear vision for how LawVu should function but faced an aggressive timeline while managing their day-to-day legal operations workload.
Operationalizing LawVu in 60 Days
The company’s legal department needed to transform LawVu into a fully operational legal operations hub. The platform’s matter management, e-billing, and contract lifecycle capabilities were underutilized, leaving stakeholders without streamlined workflows and visibility. The challenge wasn’t technical capability—it was bandwidth and expertise during an aggressive timeline.
SBO Consulting was engaged at the end of 2023 with a clear mandate: operationalize LawVu completely within 60 days. The implementation moved through two focused phases.
First, SBO rebuilt the company’s LawVu architecture to match their operational structure, designing intuitive matter intake workflows, configuring legal service provider setup and approval processes, deploying e-billing capabilities, and establishing scalable reporting frameworks.
Second, SBO activated LawVu’s Spend module for comprehensive cost tracking, implemented contract lifecycle management capabilities, and configured dashboards giving leadership real-time insight into active matters and legal spend. In addition, creating dynamic workflows with the LawVu connector for Microsoft Power Platformprovided needed efficiencies.
“It was great to see how SBO operated as an extension of the company’s team throughout deployment—providing expert guidance on platform best practices, setting realistic expectations on platform capabilities and advocating for feature enhancements with our team at LawVu when necessary. SBO’s approach prioritized user adoption from the outset and accelerated value for the company.” said Melanie Shafer, VP of Customer Experience at LawVu.
SBO and the company developed branded training materials specific to the organization, conducted targeted training sessions for different user groups, and addressed early adoption challenges immediately. When visibility gaps between teams surfaced, SBO identified and deployed platform features that solved the issues in real time.
Full Operationalization on Schedule with Strong User Adoption
With the help of SBO consulting, the company achieved full LawVu operationalization within the targeted two-month timeframe. Every core system—matter intake, e-billing, contract management, and spend tracking—went live on schedule and aligned precisely with the department’s operational requirements.
The legal team now operates with comprehensive spend visibility, enabling better cost control and informed decisions about legal service provider engagement. Matter management has become granular and data-driven, with KPIs that help the department demonstrate value across the organization. Stakeholders have access to streamlined intake workflows that encourage consistent platform use rather than workarounds. The team is currently trialing LawVu’s new AI billing guideline review feature to more easily track and monitor compliance with respect to outside counsel invoices. The approach to LawVu now is one of continuous improvement and maximizing ROI.
Most importantly, the implementation succeeded where many technology deployments fail: user adoption. By designing for simplicity on the front end while maintaining powerful backend capabilities, the platform delivered immediate value across the entire legal ecosystem — from legal team members and internal stakeholders to the legal service providers (LSPs) themselves. For the first time, LSPs could submit invoices directly through the LawVu portal rather than via email, and gain real visibility into the review, approval, and payment status of their invoices — a meaningful upgrade that extended the platform’s value well beyond the company’s internal teams.
The legal operations team commented: “SBO Consulting brings deep expertise across multiple facets of legal operations and has the breadth of knowledge to support different legal teams effectively. Their understanding of how technology and operational initiatives intersect proved invaluable as we built out our legal operations infrastructure.”
The Deputy General Counsel concluded: “SBO Consulting’s value was acting as both subject matter expert and strategic partner—taking our vision and translating it into operational reality. They provided expert-level guidance on platform best practices and helped us identify the solutions that would deliver the most value for our specific structure and stakeholder needs.”
