Mitratech Builds Simplified TeamConnect Platform Focused on Mid-Sized Legal Ops

As the desire for legal operations grows beyond the Fortune 500, the need for legal tech providers to tailor their tools to this new market is following close behind. This rise in mid-size company legal operations has spurred technology provider Mitratech to offer a new version of its TeamConnect legal management platform—one more streamlined for out-of-the-box use.

Dubbed TeamConnect Essentials, the new SaaS solution takes TeamConnect and looks to simplify it. Rather than a tailored implementation, Essentials comes with pre-configured matter types, an invoice review process with rules engine that has billing guidelines, and a suite of analytics dashboards and reports that can help get handle on spend, alongside Microsoft Office plug-ins and other features.

The result, said Chris Kraft, senior vice president of product management at Mitratech, is a system that is easier to get up and running and maintain. While TeamConnect installs can often take six to nine months, he estimated Essentials installs taking four to six weeks. While customers can then configure the system further to their needs, speed and simplicity are at the forefront.

“More of this is out-of-the-box,” Kraft told Legaltech News. “Point of view and best practices are built in, there’s pre-built templates for how they onboard new firms, and really the packaging of it is really easy for a smaller organization to get up and running.”

Customers can purchase the product on Mitratech’s website, and the company will also be demonstrating the product at the ACC Annual Meeting. Pricing for Essentials is a SaaS-based subscription model based on the size of the legal department.

According to Kraft, Mitratech saw Essentials as a natural progression of its technology platform, especially as more and more mid-sized companies are adopting legal operations.

“We started to think about, the way we would deliver this product to a large enterprise, mid-sized legal departments were a bit overwhelmed by it,” Kraft said. “So we saw a really unique opportunity to take that feeling of being overwhelmed out of the process, pre-package it, and hand-hold them in a way to get this product up and running.”

But he also made sure to note that many of the companies Mitratech is targeting have millions of dollars in outside counsel spend, where even a five percent decrease in dollars spent due to better matter management is a sizeable return on investment.

“It’s not like you’re talking about a 10 person company here,” he explained. “You’re talking about hundreds of thousands of employees, but the legal department just happens to be super efficient. They often have a lot of the same challenges, they just need something that’s sized appropriately for them.”

As an example, Kraft pointed to the analytics capabilities of Essentials. He noted that when many of these legal departments want to get insight into their spend, they “have to go to their finance team, and oftentimes, that takes quite a bit to get a financial report from an ERP system.” The goal for the more streamlined offering, then, is to eliminate some of these unique pain points that legal departments with larger budgets may have already taken care of.

And certainly, this mid-size market is one Mitratech expects to continue to grow, as companies of all sizes are looking for greater insight into their data. Kraft explained, “What has happened over the past several years, with the growth of the CLOC Institute and this massive shift in thinking about legal operations as a strategic part of the legal department and the company, is even the smaller organizations are now investing and thinking about legal technology and process.”