Strategic solutions for legal teams facing corporate cost pressures
While the volume and variety of work for in-house lawyers has increased in recent years, budgets have not always followed suit. In-house legal teams work to control costs while improving productivity and profitability. They also help drive their organization’s business goals and strategic vision. This is in addition to the standard day-to-day activities of the legal department.
Over the last five years, many legal departments have undergone significant digital changes. They have adopted new technologies and increased their digital-first mindsets at an unprecedented rate.
Now, data-driven technology is common and can help uncover and manage the value the legal department creates. To be successful, legal departments must identify the challenges they face and determine how a technological solution can help.
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Utilizing technology to reach your goals
Gain transparency through analytics
Improve your workflows and processes
Showing value while being best in class

White paper
Unlock the hidden value in your legal department with data-driven insights
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Utilizing technology to reach your goals
Increasing efficiency through workflow management, spend reduction, and providing best-in-class legal services endure as top priorities in any business and economic climate. Ultimately, legal departments need to communicate how the team is driving value and contributing to the success of the organization.
Using technology and data to help achieve these goals is becoming standard for many in-house teams. Automated matter management and spend management are now foundational to any efficient, forward-thinking legal department. While they provide full visibility over legal matters and help to better track costs and external counsel spend, the real value in such tools is the data reporting and analytics functionality. The most commonly tracked metrics are spend-based, according to the most recent Legal Department Operations Index from Thomson Reuters. They include:
- Total spend by law firm, matter type, practice group, and business unit
- Forecasted spend vs actual spend
This data offers valuable insights into the impact of proposed rates for outside counsel before you enter negotiations with your firms. It can reveal how your firm relationships have evolved and expose areas that require attention. Use this data to analyze your legal department’s performance against industry benchmarks, ensuring that you identify gaps in process and confirm that your performance and service levels are truly best in class.
Legal technology can track both what level of timekeeper is doing particular tasks and the details of that timekeeper. Tools like Legal Tracker make it easy to know who is doing the work on your matters, whether you’re trying to track diversity and inclusion information from your firms or to monitor the hours worked by partners versus associates.
Gain transparency through analytics
Quality reporting and analytics of your matters and spend can let you know exactly what is happening in your department. Formatting raw data into readable formats and reports can assist in breaking down budgets and spending, summarizing key information, and identifying developing trends in your workflow. Data is at the heart of strategic decision making. Use it wisely to advance your legal department’s priorities and your wider organization’s business goals
When you can visualize and analyze your legal department’s critical metrics in real time, you can deploy resources more optimally. This is because data and visualization help you measure exposure better and predict where problems may emerge. This all supports smarter decision making, demonstrating to your organization’s leadership how your department and outside law firms are performing and providing value.
In a world where departments and business units compete for resources, you need to determine whether you have met budgetary expectations. When you’re off budget, you must explain why. The ability to accurately track your budget and control spend on outside counsel is invaluable to your organization. Tracking the right metrics is pivotal to making solid legal procurement decisions and enabling intelligent negotiations.
By analyzing your legal department’s data on overall spend by law firm, you can identify opportunities to reallocate spend and determine whether you are receiving sufficient value. Data can help you understand fluctuations in spend over time. You may identify problems or trends that contribute to increased spend. From there, you can take proactive steps to address or prevent them in the future.
Improve your workflows and processes
New data and tracking capabilities will help you with prioritization and continuous improvement as well.
Your work with internal clients will benefit as you make data-driven decisions and communicate your department’s impact. For instance, you can track the number of contracts reviewed or generated, claims over a certain period, or active matters by business unit. You can create a snapshot of legal spend and impact by business unit so that leaders can see who is benefiting from legal department work and spend. You can enlist these specific business partners for support at budget time or use comparison data to right-size your team’s interactions with those units.
As you establish benchmarks and track improvements in spend management and other law department metrics, you can also capture learnings. Build a repository of information on the types of matters you frequently address. This includes contracts you regularly negotiate, common litigation types, and industry-specific regulations and legislation. Collecting and sharing knowledge and lessons learned makes for a more efficient and effective legal department.
Showing value while being best in class
Using data to measure your in-house legal team’s value is more important than ever. Integrating automated matter management and spend management with data analytics and reporting strengthens your legal department’s role as a strategic partner within your organization. This combination enhances operational efficiency, delivering best-in-class services to internal and external clients. By leveraging these tools, your legal team becomes a valued partner in achieving commercial and strategic goals, working smarter and more effectively to drive business success.
Dive deeper into metrics
The Thomson Reuters white paper, Using metrics to unlock value in your legal department, is an in-depth look at the tools you can use to support your strategic goals.