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With Sarbanes-Oxley demanding CEO and CFO confirmation on the accuracy and veracity of legal dollars spent, it is more important than ever for corporate legal departments to take control of their legal spend. Corporate management is increasingly demanding that legal departments operate with the same efficiencies as other business units and meet the same levels of accountability as their business unit peers. This is especially true for Fortune 500 corporate companies where the majority of their legal department's budget is spent with outside counsel.

In fact, one study conducted by Deloitte and Touche revealed that an average corporation spends 80 percent of their entire budget on outside expenses. This translates to millions and perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars that have to be accounted for and managed by the chief legal officer and attested to by corporate management.

In addition to contending with a large number of law firms, the accompanying invoices for work rendered have to be routed, scrutinized, adjusted, paid and reconciled with the corporation's billing guidelines. This work puts additional strain on already short-staffed legal departments. Moreover, the work of managing paper invoices provides no accumulated benefit; next month's invoices will arrive with the same issues and require the same amount of work by the same people. Every minute spent handling invoices is a minute spent away from managing the business or practicing law in an environment fraught with legal risk and strained margins.

Today, electronic invoicing and legal spend management technology is necessary for running a cost-efficient corporate legal department in a new world of increased accountability. Legal departments can no longer watch from the sidelines as the rest of the corporation modernizes business practices with new technology and cost-efficient solutions. They must replace dated paper-processes with advanced electronic solutions that do much more than replace paper with electronic images. Those systems must be secure and auditable enough to meet Sarbanes-Oxley requirements while sufficiently easy to use and maintain in order to keep lawyers and legal professionals on-task managing corporate risk.