Category: Legal Operations

Bodhala hosted its first live webinar on Dec. 10, 2019

Presented by Bodhala team members across Client Success, Marketing, and Product, legal leaders from around the world joined the live webinar. The webinar covered two hot-button topics: using big data analytics to uncover best practices and pitfalls to avoid when negotiating annual rate card increases with outside counsel. We highlight many of those pitfalls in our two new white papers, The Hidden Staircase and The End Of Excel Hell.

The webinar recording and presentation slides are now available here.

“Big data analytics are revolutionizing how corporate legal departments negotiate with their panel law firms, and we’re glad to share how in this webinar,” said Bodhala SVP & Head of Client Success, John Maloney. “One of the most irritating pain points for our clients is the yearly dread that comes with annual rate negotiations. Bodhala’s free and new rate card RFP platform alleviates that pain by leveraging machine learning to surface the best possible outcome for your legal department.”

Maloney explained that the webinar stemmed from seeing countless clients struggle to negotiate annual rates with panel firms, a process fraught with confusing concepts. Recognizing this universal challenge, Bodhala developed a learning series on RFP rate card negotiation, starting with what we call the “Hidden Staircase” of law firm rates.

Still, several barriers exist to getting the best possible rate, and most of them cannot be easily overcome by legal department staff. Bodhala created a whitepaper to help professionals apply our best practices for rate negotiation and navigate out of “Excel Hell.”

Bodhala’s powerful big data analytics are designed to make these processes easier. Our platform streamlines all of your RFPs in one dashboard, giving your legal department an unparalleled, 360-degree view of past spending and unmatched projection ability for the future. 

“Today’s webinar was a huge success and very exciting for us as a business,” said Kyle Johnson, Head of Marketing. “Our unique ability to pull proprietary information out of the Bodhala platform and share it with our audience proved to resonate – as was shown through the lively conversation throughout the presentation.” 

Among the interesting questions and discussion points, here are three of the top takeaways from this discussion:

1. On average, organizations allocate 75% of their outside counsel spend to seven firms. When focusing on your rate card RFP process this year, focus the bulk of the work on prioritizing your top seven firms.
2. According to the audience polls, the majority of companies represented at the webinar did not use a formal rate card RFP process (only 30% did so). Of those that did use a formal process:
   • Over half spend somewhere between 40 – 60 hours per RFP.
   • The majority have 5 – 10 panel firms.
   • The group was split almost evenly between members of the Legal Ops and GC / AGC teams.
   • The average outside counsel spend falls into the $25m – $50m range.
3. By leveraging Bodhala’s free rate card RFP platform, companies are expected to reduce the time they spend running rate cards by one-tenth (~5 hours) with better results. Those who add on Bodhala’s analytics platform are able to experience even more positive outcomes, keeping their annual spends in check and ensuring compliance by the law firm.

Bodhala is a groundbreaking legal technology platform created by lawyers to transform the half-a-trillion dollar global legal industry. Our platform refines organizational processes by empowering your legal team with deeper insights that allow you to better analyze, interpret, and optimize outside counsel spend, trailblazing a new era of legal market intelligence.

Navigating through confusing concepts like annual rate card RFP negotiations is just the beginning. For more information on how Bodhala can revolutionize your relationship with outside counsel, and how to optimize your legal spend, set up a demo today at https://www.bodhala.com/demo-bodhala.

Like what you’re seeing?

Shoot us an email at [email protected], and let’s talk about how to get started.

At this point, you have lined up your annual rate card notices from your panel law firms. Now it’s time to make sense of what’s there and make it work in your favor.

As we discussed in the first part of this series on RFP rate negotiations, every year, clients face complex rate schedules with budget implications that are often unclear. Starting from the street rates down to relationship discounts and write-offs, we call this process for arriving at a final yearly rate the “Hidden Staircase” of legal billing.

Even if you completely understand the Hidden Staircase, the entire process can quickly fall apart and cost you serious money if you can’t analyze the rate cards to ensure you’re getting the most bang for your buck.

And let’s face it: human analysis falls short when you’re seeking an apples-to-apples, market-based approach to the responses you receive. Even getting the data itself causes confusion – some numbers live in multiple Excel files, some arrive via PDF, and others are sent in the body of an email to one colleague, but not another. It’s a mess for legal operations to handle, but that’s where Bodhala can help. With our proprietary Rate Card RFP platform, your team can quickly collect and organize all rate cards in one place. We collect the data in minutes, giving you transparency on your past spend and the visibility to compare the rates of your panel firms. It’s the best way to ensure you’re getting market value for services.

To fully understand the rate responses from your firms, you must consider the factors that can affect your company’s spend throughout a given year:

• Practice areas – For any business, the mix of work is an important variable in understanding the impact of rate card increases. An M&A increase may have a disproportionate impact on the budget of a PE firm compared to a litigation increase – and vice versa for an insurance carrier.
• Matter complexity – Which of your corporate matters are seen as routine, like drafting a tech licensing agreement, versus more complex M&A?
• Timekeepers used – Are partners and associates being matched to their appropriate skill level or seniority across firms?

These factors are the biggest drivers of rate fluctuation. They disproportionately cause billing spikes as the year moves forward.

Historically, in-house legal teams have tried to analyze these factors on their own, losing hundreds of hours of staff time, causing headaches galore, and suffering from diminished eyesight due to countless hours staring at Excel sheet after Excel sheet.

At this point, negotiation is nearly impossible if a company is not empowered by a data-backed solution. Forward-thinking general counsels focused on corporate and legal innovation capable of meeting challenges in the market, recognize the need for a shift in the process. They understand the importance of using analytics to make reviewing rate card RFPs more efficient and to enable running accurate simulations against historical spend.

Spreadsheets and PDFs have clear and immediate limitations. When you consider the resources required to have just one staff person assigned to this endeavor plus one salaried employee – it becomes clear that the cost impacts can be alleviated with data analytics.

TAKING STEPS TOWARD TRANSPARENCY

If your team is still stuck in Excel Hell this rate card season, don’t worry, there is still light at the end of the tunnel. We’ve compiled a set of guidelines to help you understand what you need to look out for when you and your staff review law firm rate responses: 

• Practice area consumption
• Timekeeper consumption
• Rate changes
• Normalizing partner & associate definitions
• Partner & associate matriculation
• Discount normalization
• “Special” volume-based discounts

PRACTICE AREA CONSUMPTION

• Understanding the rate changes in the context of consumption of practice areas from previous years
  • Rate cards (within a firm and across comparable firms in the space) need to be applied to the volume of expected services (M&A, litigation, funds, broken deals, etc.) to understand the impact of law firm proposals.
  • In order to determine the volume expected, review the historical spend from previous years. Do you plan on this remaining consistent? Can you model known changes?

WANT TO KEEP LEARNING?

Download our free white paper to understand the rest of our data-backed and time-tested guidelines for understanding your RFP responses. You’ll also see a real-life example where our data saved a global bank millions on their rate negotiations.

Download The Full Guide

Shoot us an email at [email protected], and let’s talk about how to get started.

We all remember what impact the Great Recession had on large corporate legal departments. Like every company unit in a downturn, most legal teams felt extreme pressure to hold down costs. However, our data shows that despite a two-year dip in profits for Big Law partners, rates and hours continued to climb.

That’s why it’s interesting to see the culture shift explained over at Law.com, where Legaltech News reporter Victoria Hudgins describes how corporate legal departments are shifting emphasis and investment into legal data solutions.

“There are many ways we need to be nimble as a law department,” said James Michalowicz, senior manager for legal ops at TE Connectivity. “We need to be lean, and the technologies we’ve invested in allows us to be that way and allows for better positioning when a recession does occur.”

We agree, and we’re here to help legal teams weather any coming storm — recession or not.

Bodhala recently hosted an industry dinner that gathered top lawyers from premier private equity firms. At the dinner, a top PE lawyer with a major asset management firm told us that the cost of their premier firm partners, after years of rate increases, are beginning to be seen by the firms as problematic, even with budgets in the black. These are the best economic times possible for private equity, he said. “When things slow, legal will be viewed as a cost center that must make big cuts.  What are PE legal departments putting in place to get ahead of this so it does not present a corporate risk at that time?” 

We can help.

Bodhala, a groundbreaking legal technology platform created by lawyers to transform the half-a-trillion dollar global legal industry, was born in the aftermath of the Great Recession. While the economic downturn highlighted many needs for immediate cost controls, the advent of big data showed there’s hope to solve for many bad behaviors in Big Law: block billing, unexpected rate increases, lack of timely billing data, and inappropriate staffing decisions.

We recognized then that there needed to be a shift in the dynamic between legal departments and their outside counsel. Backed up by not only anecdotal evidence but with millions of dollars saved by our clients every year, we have already helped move the status quo forward.

Our proprietary benchmarking metrics and rate review algorithms generate detailed insights into every aspect of legal spend. An intuitive dashboard puts the information you need to make more cost-effective decisions about legal service providers at your fingertips, effectively boosting efficiency and reducing your bottom line. 

Contact us today to talk about how we can be that shield for any clouds that may roll in: https://www.bodhala.com/demo-bodhala

Dive Deeper

You might have found yourself thinking outside legal bills are a pain to reconcile. You’re not alone! In the first entry in our series on the legal department of the future, we help you avoid the 3 biggest legal billing problems our clients face.

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With superstar rainmaker poaching on the rise, clients of Big Law firms must adapt so as to not be left holding the bag for the new normal where “money and data rule” at their law firms.

Over at Law.com, Christine Simmons sits down with elite legal recruiter Mark Rosen, where he talks about the poaching of a top M&A rainmaker and his team from Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton.

Over the last year, our team has recognized a shift in partner compensation structures, leading to massive payouts to the biggest players at the highest level of Big Law. This trend undergirds a number of other forces driving massive increases in billing rates for premium legal talent. The Wall Street Journal described this phenomenon citing Bodhala data in a groundbreaking deep-dive article earlier this year. Get that story here.

In late October, several sources described the departure of Cleary’s Ethan Klingsberg and his $30 million book of business.

According to Bloomberg, Klingsberg’s work included leading XL Group’s $15.2 billion purchase by Axa, Staples on its $6.2 billion sale to Sycamore Partners, and Google’s $2.9 billion sale of Motorola Mobility to Lenovo in 2014.

Along with him, his new firm, London-based Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, picked up a team in a direct move to boost M&A business, hiring on corporate lawyers Pamela Marcogliese and Paul Tiger, and litigator Meredith Kotler.

The new compensation plans will guarantee massive rewards for the team.

“Klingsberg, the rainmaker leading the group move from Cleary, will be much better rewarded at his new firm. He said Klingsberg is guaranteed $10 million a year for at least five years at Freshfields, after making “a little more than $3 million” at Cleary. The other partners moving to Freshfields also got “substantial increases.”

Most notable is what seems to be driving the move. Rosen said he believes Cleary’s “unsustainable” lockstep compensation failed to compete with Freshfields’ desire to pay top dollar for top talent. Per Rosen:

“It’s not a fair system. I don’t believe you can compensate an attorney who is responsible for $40 million worth of business the same way you can compensate someone with $4 million in business. Five years from now or even sooner, I don’t think there will be any pure lockstep firms left.”

Our team recognized immediately that this validated what our data and analysis has been telling us. Today, white-shoe firms are creating new lateral tracks to attract the biggest players — and their Rolodexes. This change has led to massive yearly increases in law firm rates across all levels of experience.

The fact is, partners have no loyalty to the lockstep system anymore. We’re finding that elite lawyers expect to get in the range of one-third of their book in annual guaranteed comp, or more.

This trend has intensified as competition for blue-chip clients heats up. For example, Kleinberg’s move potentially puts the M&A portfolios of elite clients such as Google, AXA, Verizon, Goldman Sachs, Lowe’s, Walgreens Boots Alliance, Square, Stanley Black & Decker, Tiffany & Co., and American Express at play.

What does this mean for purchasers of Big Law talent? Superstars, whose advice is truly gold-plated, will be rewarded handsomely. However, because of the Nobel-Prize winning concept called the “winner’s curse” in economics, firms will inevitably overpay for the few partners out there that have more than a $25 million book. This market incongruity will lead to unjustifiably higher rates passed on to their corporate clients in order to finance the move of the same partner from Firm A to Firm B.

This trend will continue, and the focus on money and data will continue to grow.

Bodhala clients strongly believe that they should not pay more for the same partner who has moved from Firm A to Firm B. We arm your inside legal departments with the tools they need to control unwarranted rate hikes. Your data, powered by our machine learning algorithms, can help you analyze, interpret, and optimize your legal spend.

Our team is eager to work with corporate legal departments to help explain this trend, and how forward-thinking general counsels can navigate through this “new normal.” Our proprietary benchmarking metrics and rate review algorithms generate detailed insights into every aspect of legal spend. An intuitive dashboard puts the information you need to make more cost-effective decisions about legal service providers at your fingertips, effectively boosting efficiency and reducing your bottom line.

Using billing data you already own, we provide:

• Legal spend transparency through data cleansing and rate card discount normalization to allow comparison,
• Reporting granularity, based on information from your own data,
• Rate benchmarking, creating a true price market,
• Guided counsel identification, and selection.
• Fit of work: Bodhala recognizes that there is a time when you need the premium firm. Our platform can help you identify those times, and separate them out from when you don’t.

No matter what form a law firm’s partnership track takes, or whatever shifts in the market take place, we know the only true metric is what you can find in the data.

We’re eager to help you understand this new trend. Contact us today to learn more.

Dive Deeper

Some of your lawyers might be superstars, but not everyone can be LeBron James. Check out how our proprietary system can get your legal team’s billing right, every time, with this FREE white paper:

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Firm executives might consider themselves like professional sports teams, stacking the deck with superstars. But can they defend asking clients to pay every partner — every player on their team — as if he or she were an MVP?

Ketan Jhaveri, President and co-founder of Bodhala, shares a take on the modern-day law firm economics. Some people in a firm are that good. But the fact is, not everybody can be a unique once in a generation superstar, so stop pricing them like they are.

Dive Deeper

Some of your lawyers might be superstars, but not everyone can be LeBron James. Check out how our proprietary system can get your legal team’s billing right, every time, with this FREE white paper:

FREE WHITE PAPER

It’s your not-so-favorite time of year again: it’s rate card season! Whether you are in the legal department or procurement, your frustration level is probably at an all-time high as you manually try to track your legal rates from years prior.  

The truth of the matter is legal department employees poring over data in countless spreadsheets are not going to be able to establish the baseline needed to give the GC a fighting edge in negotiations. There are too many variables for human eyes to process. But there are steps you can take set your team up for success. 

As your team is inundated with rate cards from your outside firms for their new rate cards for next year, there’s a lot of jargon and confusing variables to consider, so we’d like to set forward some guidelines — a cheat sheet — to help you understand the steps ahead.

First, let’s lay out the basic nature of law firm economics: your work over the course of a year can be done by dozens of timekeepers at any one firm and hundreds or thousands across your portfolio. Each of these partners, associates, and paralegals has a different rate.  

While you may look at a blended rate to simplify things, these individual rates matter.  Even at a more general rate card level, a firm typically has ten to fifteen different rates for the associate and counsel level and ten to twelve different partner rates, depending on firm-specific seniority.   

Misunderstanding this rate structure can make it difficult to understand the true rate you’re paying for the work being done from the start. 

On top of that, there are several levels of rates that can change depending on a number of factors, including your history with the firm, the practice areas implicated by a matter, and the internal dates of matriculation for timekeepers at firms. It creates a laddering of rates in a sense. We call it the Hidden Staircase of law firm rates.

The Importance of Data in this Process

It’s hard to overstate how tricky the process of negotiating rates can be. To help you understand where this negotiation starts, think back to how your legal department’s spend has gone throughout the year prior. In every matter, you receive hundreds, if not thousands, of billing line items.

You can look at data points to get a sense of the direction of your spend. While it’s tempting to think that poring through spreadsheets or basic eBilling platforms can uncover a law firm’s tricks, they simply can’t. While these platforms give you, at most, a flat snapshot into your legal billing, there’s a richness, context, and breadth that’s missing. And while legal departments can try and triage in search of a solution for understanding the process, it’s important and far more challenging to dig deeper and get a broader view across your spend.

Our Approach Versus the Status Quo

At Bodhala, the leading tech platform enabling corporate legal teams to analyze and optimize their spend, we unlock the power of your data to help you get a firm grasp on rate negotiations. Most legal departments keep track of billing through spreadsheets and online forms systems, and we know that getting a handle on next year’s rates requires such a level of detail and finesse that it’s nearly impossible for companies to do on their own. 

Part of our power is our unique ability to analyze and explain your spend through data ingestion. Paired with Bodhala’s world-class machine learning data analytics platform, our robust legal billing rate negotiation process helps you get the most granular view on your spend, regardless of matter type or complexity. 

Our Proprietary Rate Card RFP Platform Enables Our Customers To:

• Simulate future spend expectations against past work
• Understand the complicated modern law firm economics behind associate and partner matriculation, which adds another dimension of complexity
• Distinguish discounts at the line-item level versus invoice level
• Understand how outside counsel has billed for work done
• Get real, data-backed predictability to manage spend moving forward into next year

In the Meantime

We want to be a helpful guide on this Hidden Staircase toward next year’s legal rates as it exists today. It’s our goal to help give some clarity to these steps and make sure all sides are accountable for their claims and make good on their agreements. This process might seem frustrating, but there are moves you can make to ensure your legal department gets the most equitable and most valuable rate agreement for your money.

We lay out what all these steps mean below, but suffice it to say, some of these rate discussions can get “in the weeds” rather quickly.

Starting the Rate Card Negotiation

We’ve outlined some strategies to use with your law firms as you begin the process of your next yearly rate negotiation. The main focus should be on bringing every step on the staircase to the surface, set terms, and agree to a negotiated understanding of those terms.

Step 1) Rack Rates: Set the Baseline

First, you should ask your counsel to memorialize the currently-in-force yearly actual billing rates to your company, and what their next year’s Standard Rates (“rack rates,” “street rates”) will be. Tip: You should include a statement that “no rate increases will be accepted until there is explicit approval by the client.”

Step 2) Relationship Discounts

Maybe you’ve heard your legal department gets a discount off rack because of a long-term relationship. It’s time to memorialize that understanding: for next year, your outside counsel should provide both the proposed billing rates for your company AND the published rates in their rate card. This enables you to know the current prevailing discount percentage they are providing off of published rates at present, and for what they are proposing for the coming year.

Like what you’re seeing?

Download our free white paper report to learn steps 3-7 on how to understand, predict, and act on every step of the rate card negotiation process.

THE HIDDEN STEPS WE EXPLAIN:

• Work-Type Discounts
• Net Effective Rate for Next Year
• Volume Discounts
• Write-Offs
• Your Matter-Based Net Effective Rates

Download The Full Article

Shoot us an email at [email protected], and let’s talk about how to get started.

Bodhala works out of a WeWork, owned by the We Company. We get along just fine; it’s a good office space. In our early days, we even worked alongside founder and now-former CEO Adam Neumann in his company’s early flagship space.

Over at the Wall Street Journal, Jean Eaglesham and Eliot Brown dig into the story behind We’s failed IPO. Their story centered around Neumann, once seen as the darling disruptor of the stodgy world of corporate real estate. The 40-year-old billionaire was forced to leave We on Sept. 22.

“We canceled its initial public offering last month after concerns grew among potential investors about its finances and Mr. Neumann’s behavior—leading existing investors to force him out as CEO.”

In addition to Neumann’s outlandish public behavior, the Journal reports he had strong control over what was an incomplete, bungled investor prospectus, rattling potential buyers.

“Numerous current and former We employees believe the IPO prospectus was poorly written and delivered a muddled message about their business. They cite the document’s dedication, “to the energy of we—greater than any one of us but inside each of us.”

Among those burned by the document were white-shoe law firms Skadden Arps Meagher & Flom LLP and Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP, who were cited as having helped prepare the prospectus. The story goes on to say, however, “Neumann often rejected the recommendations” of experts – even legal matter experts.

The prospectus “leaves unanswered some basic questions,” with unclear revenue reports, failure to disclose major purchases (like a brand new Gulfstream jet), and no mention of Neumann’s sale of hundreds of millions of We stock. Read the rest here.

This is, of course, a cautionary tale. It’s a bummer to see WeWork paid Big Law prices and the premium advice was ignored. Now we can’t guarantee your CEO will follow good legal advice but we can guarantee that our clients pay a market price for IPO legal advice. In fact, our clients have saved millions when they used Bodhala to select IPO counsel.

Bodhala is a groundbreaking legal technology platform created by lawyers to transform the half-a-trillion dollar global legal industry. Our platform refines organizational processes by empowering your legal team with deeper insights that allow you to better analyze, interpret and optimize outside counsel spend, trailblazing a new era of legal market intelligence.

Our clients, corporate legal departments, come to us to solve four core problems: a lack of clarity in legal billing and rates, billing reporting miscommunications, the lack of a true apples-to-apples rate comparison for law firms, and the lack of a legal talent marketplace. Bodhala’s product addresses and creates workflows for are the following:

• Legal spend transparency through data cleansing and rate card discount normalization to allow comparison
• Reporting granularity, based on information from your own data
• Rate benchmarking, creating a true price market
• Guided counsel identification, selection, and fit

Bodhala works with your legal department to highlight the right partner at the right firm at the right rate for all of your matters. This means serious savings in time and money for your in-house team and your budget.

Shoot us an email at [email protected], and let’s talk about how to get started.

Dive Deeper

Our system surfaces insights on matters across the legal industry. Check out how Bodhala’s proprietary data helped the Wall Street Journal get the real story in the changing world of elite law partnerships, where data and money rule.

Read The Article

It’s an eye-popping figure: since 2000, the headline reads, more than $105 billion in fines have been paid by corporations under judgment after successful cases litigated by attorneys general across the states.

Over at Law.com, writer Sue Reisinger highlights a report by the DC-based Good Jobs First, a DC-based nonprofit dedicated to government and corporate accountability. She cites a recent report, Bipartisan Corporate Crime Fighting by the States, more than $105 billion wherein the successes of state AGs are cited.

According to GJF’s intro of the document, “the report focuses on 644 cases in which AGs from multiple states took on companies over issues ranging from mortgage abuses to illicit marketing of prescription drugs and collected more than $100 billion in settlements over the past two decades.”

Among the biggest targets? Bank of America, which has paid requisite penalties to states totaling $26 billion.

For his part, the BofA spox demurred, saying “[t]here’s nothing new in the report, which simply highlights the well-known fact that we made substantial payments to resolve mortgage-related issues largely stemming from Countrywide and other acquisitions.”

That’s an interesting way to talk about $26,000,000,000.00 in fines.

One interesting observation was the bipartisan note the report rings. While many may observe the partisan rancor over suits filed over Obamacare or President Trump’s immigration policies, co-author Phil Mattera said the report “shows quite a significant history of states working together, especially in a bipartisan way.”

Mattera went on to say he expected suits and assessments like those described to grow.

What does this mean for corporate leaders? Well, if you’re GJF, probably nothing, if you play by the rules.

Every company and individual in America is entitled to a vigorous defense, with the presumption of innocence. But we all know the law and the priorities of attorneys general can change with every election year. With 2020 approaching, it’s smart for every savvy general counsel to take a look at their legal spend, and make sure they’re taking steps to maximize the value of their spend while matching matter of the highest need to talent of the highest caliber.

Bodhala is a groundbreaking legal technology platform created by lawyers to transform the half-a-trillion dollar global legal industry. Our platform refines organizational processes by empowering your legal team with deeper insights that allow you to better analyze, interpret and optimize outside counsel spend, trailblazing a new era of legal market intelligence.

We’re built on data – and how we develop it, how we utilize it and how we analyze it for the benefit of our customers sets us apart. Our proprietary benchmarking metrics and rate review algorithms generate detailed insights into every aspect of legal spend. An intuitive dashboard puts the information you need to make more cost-effective decisions about legal service providers at your fingertips, effectively boosting efficiency and reducing your bottom line.

Get in touch [email protected].

Dive Deeper

Want to learn more about how our cutting-edge AI system can supercharge the value in your legal spend? Download this FREE whitepaper with three billing guidelines that will start you down the right track:

Free Billing Guidelines

Over at Law.com, Nicholas Bruch posits an interesting theory: the long term trends suggesting continued growth in corporate insourcing of legal work — that is, hiring internally versus offloading work to outside counsel — may not tell as complete a story as the trend lines suggest.

As the graph shows, and our data cited in The Wall Street Journal confirms, the cost of doing business with Big Law is going up. In fact, it’s now about 3x the cost to work with outside counsel versus hiring in-house at a legal department. But there may be more to consider for the future of corporate counsel beyond in-house or outside counsel.

Interestingly, Bruch suggests that while outside counsel ultimately will have to adjust its outlook to deal with the rise of insourcing, a viable new option has emerged for corporate legal departments, highly correlated with the rise of the advent of big data in the legal market: alternative legal service providers.

What’s driving this trend? Costs cut by efficiency.

The ALSP operational model, which tends to be less reliant on costly lawyers, will be able to deliver services more efficiently. All of this will change the way law departments approach pricing and sourcing. Notably, it will fundamentally change the math that led law departments to in-source.

As you probably know, ALSPs help give corporate legal departments a new way to manage high-demand matters like document review, electronic discovery, research, and more.

We’ll keep monitoring developments in this space so keep looking out for more. In the meantime, we’d love to talk more about how we can help continue the trend of bending the cost curve downward, while working with your inside and outside counsel, and any ALSPs you currently utilize. At Bodhala, our data scientists built our proprietary machine learning platform to help you understand, predict, and act with confidence on your legal spend.

Shoot us an email at [email protected] to learn more.

Legal Department 2025

Get It Right The First Time

BODHALA IQ WHITE PAPER

• Microsoft has agreed to join a growing coalition of legal departments looking to standardize legal data for machine learning environments

• More and more legal departments are talking about making data-driven decisions with their outside counsel
• Bodhala does precisely that with the power of our industry-leading data set and analytics

Over at Bloomberg’s Big Law Business, Roy Strom reports Microsoft has begun rolling out a new standard for legal taxonomy developed by the Standards Advancement for the Legal Industry (SALI) Alliance.

Although now in a pilot program, the move is an effort to standardize all legal matters facing the tech giant in hopes of taking control of legal spend.

Here’s a killer quote that caught our eye:

“We are more and more asked to think about how we enable our teams to make data-driven decisions about how they engage with outside counsel and how they do their work,”

– Rebecca Benevides, Director of Legal Business

Benevides noted that SALI taxonomy will help Microsoft legal teams by creating cleaner data models to leverage.

Preach! We hear this from clients and in discussions with industry leaders every week. And an implementation at this scale will almost certainly lead to greater adoption of a data-driven mentality across the market.

Bodhala is a groundbreaking legal technology platform created by lawyers to transform the half-a-trillion dollar global legal industry. Our platform refines organizational processes by empowering your legal team with deeper insights that allow you to better analyze, interpret and optimize outside counsel spend, trailblazing a new era of legal market intelligence.

We’re built on data – and how we develop it, how we utilize it and how we analyze it for the benefit of our customers sets us apart. Our proprietary benchmarking metrics and rate review algorithms generate detailed insights into every aspect of legal spend. An intuitive dashboard puts the information you need to make more cost-effective decisions about legal service providers at your fingertips, effectively boosting efficiency and reducing your bottom line.

Anyone who works at the intersection of Big Law and Big Business knows there’s a shift underway. Just recently the Wall Street Journal cited our data to show how the legal industry is changing at a lightning pace. Check it out!

We’d love the opportunity to help your company follow Microsoft’s lead. Shoot us a message and let’s talk about how your existing data can make sense of your spend. 

Request a custom demo here or email us at [email protected].