CounselLink Impact Awards

“CounselLink is our light at the end of the tunnel”

The following Impact Awards submission was written by Sandy Sullivan, Senior Corporate Paralegal at National Vision. Ms. Sullivan is one of three Impact Award winners for 2017. All three winning submissions are being featured in Business of Law blog posts from LexisNexis.

National Vision is the 4th largest retail optical company in the world. By the end of my first year here as a paralegal in 2008, we had 560 retail locations and have grown today to 980 retail locations in 46 states.

With new stores come new associates, and today our company employs 10,000 associates.

When I started at National Vision, our small in-house legal department consisted of 2 attorneys, myself, and another paralegal. Today we have 5 attorneys, 2 senior paralegals, and 2 administrative assistants.

It may not seem like a lot of growth, but for a company that has increased so much in size, this is a much-needed growth spurt. When you have this size company in so many states, the laws are different and there is a lot of legal work in every aspect of the law (e.g., real estate, corporate, litigation, employment, compliance…).

Since it was impossible to handle every matter in-house, we engage many firms as our outside counsel depending on the matter.

With myself practically managing the department, I kept up with the legal billing. It was done the old fashioned way – by U.S Mail.

Sometimes an invoice would fall through the cracks, other times it may not have been paid in a timely fashion, sometimes (with being so busy), I would just forget.

I had to keep up with how much they spent, when it was paid, how much was accrued…….. and so on and so on. The task became daunting and inefficient in every way.

Then came along CounselLink, our light at the end of the tunnel.

I researched many different management systems and nothing compared with CounselLink. CounselLink was simplistic in the way it was so user friendly. They had me at “Hello” when making the decision to choose this system.

The way CounselLink flags discrepancies in hourly rates and billing procedures has helped keep our costs down with little effort.

We went live with CounselLink in 2015 and have been happy ever after. Our billing system is finally efficient and works like a charm.

That means our vendors are pleased because they submit an invoice through CounselLink, it gets approved, and it gets paid….. simple as that.

It has saved our company so much time and energy in knowing that anything we need to know regarding billing, legal spend, ratios, and savings is all at the touch of a key stroke with CounselLink.

Thank you CounselLink for making my job stress-free!!!

CounselLink Impact Awards posted first on https://injuryhelpnowcom.blogspot.com