We spoke to Dino Eliopulos, Fulcrum GT’s vice president of innovation and solutions, about how Fulcrum’s new marketplace-style network will modernise and automate source-to-pay.
Fulcrum GT in August unveiled its newest business of law solution, RAPIDx, which is an end-to-end legal spend management lifecycle tool for law firms and corporate legal teams.
Part of Fulcrum’s Snap Direct platform, which provides cloud-based new business intake, e-billing, master pricing, management report and human capital management solutions, RAPIDx provides law firms and their clients with a form of marketplace in which legal services are sourced, managed and transacted.
During a demo of RAPIDx at ILTACON 2023, Dino Eliopulos, Fulcrum GT’s vice president of innovation and solutions, told Legal IT Insider: “In other industries, modernisation benefits the customer, but that isn’t always the case in legal. RAPIDx is a new marketplace-style network that modernises and automates source-to-pay to benefit the end user.”
While RAPIDx is for both law firms and corporate legal teams, the demonstration given was from a legal ops perspective. RAPIDx show the items that legal teams are sourcing to their outside counsel, including any RFPs and/or reverse auctions and matters in progress, with plan v actual data available instantly on a dashboard.
Users can click into their legal services provider network and search for attorneys by type of law, jurisdiction, and region to get to what Eliopulos refers to as the ‘store front’, where legal teams can see what work firms have bid for and won and their rates, plus how attorneys and firms identify themselves and which industries they serve. Firms are also reviewed internally to give them Google style ratings. A handshake logo shows that a provider has achieved preferred adviser status, which means that they have met the client’s criteria in areas including transparency in sharing their billing data.
Within the platform you can create a new listing (think intake form), attach exhibits or briefs, select payment type, and set a budget in support of auctions or sealed bids.
Corporate legal teams can use RAPIDx to calculate the correct cost of work put out to bid, so that if the figure they are quoted is different to expectations, they can have a conversation or select a different provider.
One of the ambitions behind RAPIDx is to enable teams to move away from the billable hour by having full visibility of all of the services that their firms are engaged in, so they can effectively bundle them up and bill them under one retainer. Eliopulos said: “Legal operations teams want to see value, not just hours, and we’re thinking about ways to set up a subscription model to break the barrier of the dollar as the only measure of value. Part of being able to do that is to be able to see the progress of matters and be able to drill down into these kinds of metrics.”
Fulcrum now counts among its clients some of the largest global law firms such as DLA Piper, Norton Rose Fulbright, Baker McKenzie, and Eversheds Sutherland.
Fulcrum GT’s managing director and co-founder Ahmed Shaaban said of the launch of RAPIDx: “To support their ongoing digital transformations, corporate legal departments are changing their rules of engagement, such that most are no longer passive bill payers content to operate with limited interactions and visibility into their outside counsel data. Today’s law firms recognize they too must evolve as their clients become increasingly sophisticated. Fulcrum GT identified this trend and six years ago began collaborating with corporate legal departments and law firms to develop a platform to revolutionize the legal services market. We believe RAPIDx represents the future legal supply chain and the path to effortless efficiency. Early responses from our customers support that view, and we’re excited to bring this innovative new platform to the market.”
caroline@legaltechnology.com