When I was a student at Harvard Law 20 years ago, I quickly noticed that law firms were like black boxes, billing hefty rates without much transparency or accountability. I now like to joke that people have more data about their underwear purchases on Amazon than corporate legal departments have about their law firms and how these firms deliver their services.
My experience at law school, coupled with my business partner Ketan’s 10 years as a corporate attorney, exposed us to the systemic cracks in the legal system. We saw law firms padding their wallets with more money than the assumed value they provided their clients.
We’re now in a moment of time where these cracks are about to get bigger. With COVID-19, we anticipate a rise in legal cases as companies turn to law firms to help them mitigate the negative financial impacts of this pandemic, from layoffs, to the grinding halt of M&A transactions, and to potential mass bankruptcies.
After the dot-com crisis, 9/11 and the 2008 financial crisis, law firms increased their hourly billings, even as their corporate clients experienced significant hardships. In 2009, top law firms increased profits per partner (PPP) between 10 and 34 percent notwithstanding the financial chaos surrounding them, according to the AmLaw 100 rankings.
This is why Ketan and I created Bodhala. We wanted to tackle the outdated legal marketplace to bring transparency to the billable hour and sophisticated economics to the legal industry—one where visibility and fair competition lead to the selection of the right lawyer at the right law firm at the right price.
With Bodhala, we created an AI-driven platform for the $500 billion legal services market. We provide essential 360-degree data on law firms and the analytical leverage needed to better allocate the legal market between its buyers and sellers. Our unique data and platform thereby provides us the opportunity to sit at the center of the dynamic legal ecosystem.
We brought the Bodhala platform to market in 2016 serving clients in financial services, healthcare services, insurance, energy, and private equity. Within the past year, we’ve experienced 300+ percent growth in both revenue and headcount and look forward to continuing on this trajectory in 2020. Today we are excited to announce our first institutional round—$10 million in growth capital led by Edison Partners.
When we first met Edison’s Dan Herscovici, we knew it was a fit because he understood our mission to deliver groundbreaking legal technology solutions to empower companies to analyze, interpret, and optimize outside counsel spend, trailblazing a new era of legal market intelligence with real transparency, real accountability, and real control.
With this financing, we are going to accelerate sales and marketing as well as product expansion. Specifically, we want to enhance our datasets to become even more valuable to our clients. Edison Partners has helped build great software businesses in other verticals so we are excited to have their expertise as we look to expand.
I look forward to sharing more great things to come as we usher in a market-driven economy to the legal industry and deliver more value to our customers.
“The Great Retrade” is happening across a number of industries, affecting companies big and small.
For the first time ever, law firms are unable to avoid the shared economic struggle and must participate in “The Great Retrade.”
Some firms will find themselves at risk during COVID-19.
Law firm’s clients are deferring payments and halting work.
Bodhala predicts significant renegotiation of legal bills during and after COVID-19.
“The Great Retrade”
As COVID-19 continues to devastate our economy, “The Great Retrade” is taking shape for companies big and small.
From the real estate industry to airlines, insurance, and hospitals – every line item in a company’s budget is being retraded in an effort to stay afloat amidst the chaos. This is reported all day in the financial papers and television.
Less well known is that Bodhala’s data has shown fewer bills being paid throughout March and April and we’re hearing first-hand the struggles on our Client Success calls.
Although they’ve historically sheltered themselves from previous crises, law firms must now also share in the pain each of the aforementioned industries is experiencing. Let’s take a glance at the new realities companies are facing.
Law Firms:
Our law firm health models are projecting financial troubles in the second half of 2020 for the top firms dependent on M&A due to the slowdown in global and private equity M&A that began in March. Given these firms’ dependence on such matters and the high profit yield these present, much will depend on the firms’ lines of credit with their banks.
Bodhala predicts a significant number of the first half of 2020 legal bills will be recut at the end of COVID-19.
Court closures, holds on settlement conversations, and a loss of new deals have left law firms with no choice other than to reduce their staff and payments.
Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP has cut associate salaries by 25 percent while partners are no longer receiving compensation.
Pryor Cashman LLP has furloughed some associates, a once unprecedented thought, although the firm expects to bring them back in the near future.
Baker Donelson slashed compensation for associates and staff by 20 percent as they realize that law firms have become an afterthought with clients halting the firm’s current work and deferring payments.
Real Estate:
At the start of each month, there’s one thing on landlords’ minds – rent checks. However, the coronavirus has thrown a wrench in this expectation as renters struggle to make their payments. Through the end of the first week of the month, one-third of American renters had not yet sent in their rent check.
Think it’s just your average Joe struggling to pay rent? Think again. Here’s a quick rundown of how some corporate giants are handling April rent –
Nike is renegotiating leases as they closed stores last month and anticipate the closure carrying on for the foreseeable future.
Petco paid 25% of their April rent and stated in a letter to landlords that the payment was made “under protest and duress in anticipation of potential future withholding.”
Ross Stores have halted rent payments while stores remain closed. Once stores reopen, they’ll pay rent equivalent to roughly two percent of sales until their sales reach 70 percent of the revenue received at the same period in 2019.
WeWork is individually reaching out to its roster of over 600 global landlords as the co-working company has halted rent payments at several US locations and alternatively looks for an asset-specific solution to benefit both parties.
Equinox, though to the dismay of owner Related, has advised landlords that the luxury fitness company will not be paying April rent.
Subway, prior to the start of the month, alerted their landlords that they will reduce or postpone their April rent payment. Additionally, the fast food chain is cutting royalty payments in half.
Insurance:
With shelter-in-place orders in effect and Americans buckling down at home, auto-insurance carriers are citing a dramatic drop in accident claims as mileage was down between 35 to 50 percent across the US.
As a result, some auto-insurance carriers are making the move to payout the anticipated amount of claims they expected to send customers this year – even though they no longer have to.
AllState is issuing over $600 million in shelter-in-place checks to customers as the company looks to provide help when it’s needed most.
American Family Insurance followed suit as it’s returning $200 million to its policyholders.
Additionally, many insurers have extended payment plans and waived late fees to ease up on the financial qualms Americans are experiencing during COVID-19.
Air Travel:
The vaporization of air travel during the coronavirus pandemic has airlines scrambling to make up for lost revenue.
United and Delta have reached out to their respective credit partners to discuss selling miles ahead of schedule and at a steep discount.
Delta Airlines pledged a number of airplanes for a $2.6 billion credit line from banks as the airline continues to burn through $60 million a day.
American Airlines arranged a $1 billion loan led by Citigroup which included a second mortgage on its most valuable route – New York to London Heathrow.
Hospitals:
As if hospitals weren’t already overwhelmed enough – they’re facing the overarching issue of increased expenses at a time of little to no revenue.
Hospitals across the nation are in the process of increasing ICU bed count, a necessary yet costly task. Bringing a regular hospital ward up to ICU level entails the implementation of expensive equipment such as heart monitors, oxygen monitors, and ventilators.
Along with equipment, hospitals are increasing staffing as they care for the drastic number of COVID-19 infected patients.
Hospitals, including Cedar Sinai and Harbor-UCLA in Los Angeles, have cut back on lucrative elective procedures in order to make more room for those affected by the coronavirus.
This will result in a loss of millions of dollars of revenue at each hospital.
Pay Cuts:
In an effort to conserve cash during the crisis, company executives are taking pay cuts up to 100 percent as they navigate the uncertain COVID climate.
Disney executives have taken pay cuts up to 30 percent with no definitive end date. Company Chairman, Bob Iger, has passed up his salary entirely as Disney furloughed over 43,000 employees.
Boeing CEO, Dave Calhoun, and Board Chairman, Larry Kellner, are both foregoing their 2020 salaries.
GE CEO, Lawrence Culp, has given up his full salary while David Joyce, the company’s Vice Chairman and President and CEO of GE Aviation will forego half of his salary.
Lyft co-founders, Josh Zimmer and Logan Green, have pledged to donate their salaries through June.
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Informed decision making is more critical than ever as you manage expenses throughout this economic turmoil. Don’t let your business make the mistake of shelling out more money than you need to. Bodhala is here to help by providing real transparency, real accountability, and real control.
We’re excited and proud to announce our new branding and logo. It marks the next phase in our journey and a new opportunity to deliver groundbreaking legal technology solutions to in-house legal teams.
You’ll see it’s not just our logo that’s changing. We’ve changed our website, our social media, our messaging, and our focus to better reflect the way we help our clients succeed.
It’s an exciting era for Bodhala — our steady growth has brought new clients, new teammates, and new products that are reimagining the legal services marketplace. By providing legal market intelligence, insights, and guidance to corporations, we’re able to help them optimize their legal spend and maximize their relationships with their law firms.
Since signing our first client in 2016, we have seen multiple new trends surface in the legal industry, but we’re the first and only technology company that provides corporate legal departments with the “source of truth” — real time, actionable data that unmasks law firm pricing and inefficiencies, empowering corporations to drive value on every dollar of legal spend.
Our continued mission is to empower teams to analyze, interpret and optimize outside counsel spend, trailblazing a new era of legal market intelligence with real transparency, real accountability, and real control.
If you want to learn more about our product stack and legal market trends, I encourage you to visit our new website where you can sign-up for our webinars, check out our blog and industry-specific case studies.
As always, if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out! Until then, we’ll keep working tirelessly to bring value to legal departments all over the world.
The COVID-19 outbreak is an unsettling time. Our sincere hope is that you are healthy, safe, and secure during this extraordinarily challenging period. As the situation has unfolded these past few weeks, and as we continue to work remotely, I wanted to briefly share how Bodhala has acclimated and performed.
Our crisis-management plan has exceeded expectations to date — I will continue to monitor developments closely.
I am grateful that our Client Success, Tech, and Product teams have been able to deliver all of our work seamlessly and on time. Specifically, Bodhala has taken the proper precautions to ensure the following:
Each Bodhala team member is secure and safe while working remotely. All employees are fully equipped with the technology required to continue working on all client matters without disruption. Key employees assigned to your company’s matters have complete access to all pertinent information needed to execute their work.
The Bodhala platform is secure and will not experience any data interruptions. Invoice data will continue to be ingested on its regular cadence and your team will have uninterrupted access to the cloud-based Bodhala platform.
Although working remotely, productivity has not diminished – in fact, many team members have expressed higher productivity levels during this time. Each employee is working efficiently and tirelessly on all business matters. We stand at the ready to support you and your team.
To guarantee we stay focused on the tasks at hand, I convene our senior leadership team twice daily to provide updates on each team’s work and to address any concerns that arise. We pay very close attention to the health — physical and mental — of each employee.
In these uncertain times, finding efficiencies in your enterprise’s spend categories has never been more urgent. Bodhala is here to help you.
Our team continues to lean into our work and we are more passionate than ever about the service and success we provide to you. We remain intently focused on our mission to deliver groundbreaking legal technology solutions to empower you to analyze, interpret and optimize outside counsel spend.
We are incredibly grateful for your partnership and continued support. Together, we will navigate this uncertainty and come out stronger because of it. Should you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to reach out to me directly.
One thing’s clear: legal tech is being catapulted into the legal industry at a staggering rate. It is bringing about changes that will forever transform the practice of law and the delivery of legal services. The question you should be asking yourself is this: “Does my legal team have control over where our legal spend is going and why we’re spending where we are?”
1. Are your legal bills going up year over year?
If your legal bills are increasing, you’re not alone.
Transparent information about legal spending has become increasingly hard to find. Our data shows hourly firm rates are tracking at almost four times the rate of inflation. The industry is clearly shifting towards a boost in annual profits for law firms, but little has been done to hold them accountable for their rapid rate increases.
Today, law firms are operating like sports teams – gathering the top athletes and pulling them together. Ultimately, this can get extremely expensive.
We all agree that if you find and recruit LeBron, you should pay him LeBron wages. However, it is likely that only 5-10% of your firm’s partners are classified as top-tier talent, and within those firms, they charge Lebron rates for every other 2nd and 3rd-tier partner.
Bodhala helps you unbundle pricing and pay partners appropriately, based on their capabilities and the matters they work on.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Us4HZOStKoo
At the end of the day, we’re advocates for data-driven solutions that improve the relationships, accountability, and transparency between legal firms and in-house counsel.
Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s continue to explore other factors to consider when purchasing legal tech solutions.
2. Identify your key challenges and bottlenecks
Committing to a new tech solution undoubtedly requires a certain level of internal due diligence. In order to get the most out of your investment and work towards your desired outcome, your in-house legal counsel must first identify its key challenges and bottlenecks to set clear criteria.
The truth of the matter is, no tech solution can solve all of your problems. The challenge is finding one solution that best addresses your core issues.
Begin the auditing process by holding internal discussions about the tasks that are taking up the majority of each employee’s time. This discussion may reveal budgeting issues or a lack of internal processes to manage rate card RFPs. Take note of all the issues at hand.
Once you identify the gap in processes, acknowledge the skills that you have on the team and the level of effort required to complete each task. Be sure to note any opportunities to improve efficiency.
Why stop there?
Some tech solutions are designed to help you become more efficient, while others provide capabilities that you could not handle on your own. Bodhala can do both, so let’s now explore how this materializes.
3. What systems do you use to ensure your data is clean and accurate?
While most legal-tech solutions tout analytics and reporting capabilities, few do it well. Effective solutions go beyond reporting and help you gather insights that inform key business decisions. The legal industry, in particular, faces complexities that are not often addressed in catch-all reporting and data-visualization solutions such as Tableau.
Further, e-billing platforms have also failed to efficiently analyze spending on a larger scale. E-billing may give you insight into what you’re spending your money on, without giving you the “why” or “how.”
The main reason for discrepancies and irregularities in your legal data is the fact that taxonomies vary across legal practices and firms, which complicates datasets and provides inaccurate results. Complexities in discounts applied, inaccurate data entry, and many other factors also contribute to the issue.
Bodhala’s Hercules database provides source-of-truth data sets that help augment and enhance line item data. Hercules provides data around firms, timekeepers, practice areas, anonymized street rates, and domain-specific measurements that provide unprecedented transparency.
Supplementary to Hercules’ QA rules, Bodhala’s Data Ingestion Team also guarantees that your data is clean and consistent across the board.
4. Capabilities that improve visibility and transparency
The lack of clarity, visibility, and transparency has allowed legal firms to get away with being big black boxes, complete with messy billing, hidden charges, and inconsistent rates. These factors have made accurate billing nearly impossible to track.
When shopping for a legal tech solution, identify unique offerings like Bodhala’s standardized rate cards.
In the past, rate cards provided little to no explanation on industry rates, net effective rates, relationship discounts, and the practice area discounts that were being applied to your invoices. Bodhala consolidates and standardizes all your rate cards in one place, which provides details on discounts and write-offs in every line, allowing you to dive into the details and uncover where your dollars are going.
5. Take data security seriously
Legal and financial data is comprised of personally identifiable and proprietary information that can put your business in danger if compromised. While basic security protocols may seem standard, it’s simply not safe to assume that your data will be protected.
When looking for your next legal tech solution, be sure to ask questions about the prioritization of data security, data encryption, backups, and other strategies that are being employed to keep your data safe.
6. Ease of implementation: integrations with your current workflow
Before you pull the trigger on finding the right legal tech solution, you must evaluate your onboarding process and how it affects your workflow. The last thing you need is an onboarding process that takes 10 times longer than expected and completely reorganizes the way you work. The time and resources that you lose implementing this new technology is too costly and must be considered when calculating the total cost of ownership.
Tech platforms are inherently complicated, especially when dealing with tremendous amounts of sensitive legal data. To better predict your success with a legal tech platform, look for a solution that works with you and your external teams. You want something that is easy to onboard, but is also easy to educate your team on. Don’t be afraid to ask questions about a dedicated account manager, training programs, reference materials, and communication channels.
7. Tracking and measuring your desired outcome
Set SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time-bound) goals in the beginning of your tech evaluation process. Refine those as you make your vendor selection and hold both the team and platform accountable for them. Remember, if you set goals together, you’re sharing the responsibility to extract success from your new investment.
For example, you can set KPIs around time saved on RFPs or the percentage saved on outside legal spend. Whatever it may be, ensure these goals are baked into regular touchpoints with your account team during your QBRs.
8. Meaningful client support
Finding success on any tech solution requires a proper onboarding and training process. Adopting a new solution is rarely plug-and-play and requires new workflows, internal product experts, and comprehensive training.
As we like to say, garbage in, garbage out. You’re more likely to find success with your new platform if your team has the foundational training to use it correctly.
A dedicated client success manager is also integral to your success. A product expert can help you maximize results with the least amount of effort possible, so you’re not stuck wasting time on a product that you purchased in order to save time and money.
9. Leverage referrals to find the right solution for you
While online review sites like G2 and Capterra can provide a general sense of a product’s core capabilities, there’s no better way to see if a solution may be right for you than to obtain a word-of-mouth referral.
Ask for a reference and take some time to speak to current customers of the tech solution. Come prepared with questions and get an honest understanding of both the good and bad of the solution you’re shopping for.
In the not-so-distant past, legal operations was thought of as a field for people interested in administrating law offices (if it was thought of at all). However, in the past five years or so, the position has completely turned around and become extremely in-demand because of the myriad ways it has proven to improve legal process efficiency and service delivery in corporate legal departments.
One of the major catalysts for the upswing in legal operations careers is the information explosion that has affected all parts of legal. The steep increase in records and data attached to legal matters, and the cost of managing that increase, has resulted in a desperate need for dedicated professionals. While some legal ops professionals excel with more granular tasks among legal practice areas, the best of the bunch tend to be agile generalists who can multitask and take on a wide range of problems. This was a key theme of the session moderated by Onit’s Paige Edwards at Legaltech 2020. The session featured experienced legal ops professionals from Prudential, Purdue Pharma and Toyota.
As the practice of law and the business of handling an organization’s legal and regulatory matters becomes more multi-disciplinary and demanding, legal ops professionals must often be the bridge between people and technology. They often serve as interpreters between legal, IT and the business. Legal ops professionals are tasked with convincing executives that processes and/or technology need updating and overhauling. Sometimes the change can be costly and time consuming, and the best legal ops professionals are the ones that “wade through the tall grass and bring data” to prove that the change is worth it.
Legal ops professionals tend to be some of the most dedicated professionals in the legal industry, and their results speak for their tenacity. Some of the most notable professionals got their start from sitting in on meetings with the idea that they could do something better and faster and then having the courage to approach a manager or executive about their findings. If you think you have the skills to see legal matters on a big picture level, understand technology and have a drive for process efficiency, a career in legal operations might be a great fit.
If you’re interested in a legal operations career, or if you’re looking to hire and need a legal operations job description, check out this blog post from SimpleLegal.
Our clients tell us every day about their challenges budgeting for outside legal counsel. Every year their law firms impose higher rates causing our clients to find more money to cover the increased cost.
Law firms have historically had overwhelming pricing power in the market — far out of proportion to what they deserve in a properly functioning market. They have been able to set their prices and demand clients pay their rates.
It’s evident this power has been wielded irresponsibly. And it’s gone on for decades.
Since the financial crisis in 2008, law firm partner rates at the most prestigious firms have increased more than 72 percent, according to Bodhala data.
With increased pressure to control operating expenses for high-stakes legal matters, corporate legal departments are forced into acting like Sisyphus, pushing a boulder uphill every year trying to stay under budget with little control over the rates they pay to outside firms.
Law firms have justified their rate increases with a series of talking points related to the cost of goods sold — increasing real estate costs, higher salaries to associates, lower realization rates, and fear of losing their partners, among others. Firms have claimed that they are passing the costs of their business onto their clients. But when you look at the data, there is no justification for price increases other than to boost firm profits.
We were interested in this reality and dug into the market looking for trends. What we’ve found validates our assumptions.
We researched law firm billing rates from the turn of the century to now and compared it to the market at large. Interestingly, the findings revealed that, relative to inflation, law firm street rates have greatly outpaced hikes in the costs for college and average rent, and only barely lagged health care premium increases.
The Bodhala Big Law Partner Index
As you can see, these elite partners have seen their rates increase dramatically, right through the Great Recession. Has this been the case in any other market? Other than in monopoly or other non-competitive markets, do CEOs get the power to increase prices by 5-12 percent every year as a matter of course?
The Current Market: Compounding Rates Albert Einstein called compounding interest the 8th wonder of the world. “He who understands it…earns it. He who doesn’t pays it.”
Law firms have used compounding interest to generate record profits even as they claim to give clients meaningful discounts. Here’s an anonymized representation of a real firm’s increasing rates to a client between 2015 and 2018. Note the trends behind those stated rates:
As a result of this shell game of sorts, the market itself is murky. Those in legal procurement wonder, what is the ‘true’ cost? Indeed, who sets the rates? Where do these market pressures lead?
It’s the same answer year after year: costs go up and clients foot the bill.
The Future: Resetting of a Broken Market At its basic level, a market of any kind should reset itself when the supply outnumbers the demand. The legal market has been unable to arrive at this market-clearing event due to the enormous pricing power of law firms. And law firms have that power in part because of the absence of a “source of truth” — a comprehensive dataset that gives the demand side an understanding of how law firms are price-takers in the market.
Enabling the demand side — corporate legal departments — to have verifiable, accountable data on their consumption of legal services will enable them to become active participants in the price market, and not just be passive price-takers.
This is the future we’re looking to build.
The Bodhala Difference 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.
With our technology and expert guidance, your legal department’s budget — that Sisyphean boulder — gets easier to understand, predict, and manage. It’s our goal that you can end this cycle for good. But it takes the power of Big Data to take on the power of status quo systems.
We’re built on data – and how we develop it, 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.
Bodhala’s clients understand the complexity of their work, where the market trends are, and what the next steps need to be — based on market-wide benchmarks for legal spend.
Let’s talk about the process. Bodhala takes the data you own, along with our proprietary industry data, and delivers insights into efficiency levels, law firm leverage ratios, current rates against similar firms and industry-wide averages, average matter cost, and much more.
This trove of information makes a general counsel’s team much more effective at legal spend management and getting the best outcomes from that spend. What’s more, it’s configured to help you understand precisely where your spend is and should be, compared to others in the market.
If your legal department has an eBiller, great! Your team has taken the first step to move your legal department out of the dark ages…but don’t stop there. eBillers help tell you what you paid, but not what you should spend.
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CURRENT STATE
For over two decades, corporate legal departments have turned to eBilling platforms out of necessity. The processing and managing of bills and legal spend with their outside firms have become far too cumbersome without automated assistance, and the work and payment structures have grown increasingly complex as the years go on.
Many companies already have and rely on eBillers to manage basic legal spend needs. Wolters Kluwer’s Passport, Thomson Reuters’ Legal Tracker, and LexisNexis’ CounselLink are just a few of the major players in this legacy market. Despite this abundance of companies addressing legal administrative tasks, there is a lack of innovation addressing the strategic and analytical initiatives of legal departments. This innovation gap results in an overworked in-house legal team, spiraling costs, inaccurate reporting, and an inability to make data-driven decisions.
FUTURE STATE
Why is a change needed now? The average rate per outside counsel hour across the AmLaw 200 has gone up 30% since 2014. With legal rates increasing every single year, and with fee arrangements and billing structures becoming more and more complex, there are problems E-billers just can’t recognize or solve. Even the most advanced e-Biller’s core function is to process an invoice, and that’s their technological ceiling. What’s lacking is true, market-wide data analytics to give in-house legal teams total control of their legal spend and distinct measurement of historical deal spend to untangle hidden aspects of legal tasks.
The Bodhala platform is designed by lawyers for lawyers to go beyond eBilling. Our proprietary platform gives GCs, CLOs, and their teams the tools to not only ingest and clean up their eBilling data but understand the nuances of their spend and make confident decisions with outside counsel. Using revolutionary machine learning algorithms designed to surface and correct the most complex of legal billing situations, Bodhala is able to sort out blended billing rates to identify the best talent for a matter. Our platform offers groundbreaking legal technology solutions that empower teams to analyze, interpret and optimize outside counsel spend — trailblazing a new era of legal market intelligence. Real transparency, real accountability, real control.
Tableau: A Business Intelligence Platform, NOT a Legal Intelligence Platform
With the abundance of data available at our fingertips, organizations are increasingly challenged to utilize data in meaningful ways. IT departments often overstate the utility of data visualization tools to internal legal teams to map out high-level metrics through charts and graphs – in ways that otherwise wouldn’t be apparent through traditional spreadsheets.
Tableau has been the leader among ’self-service’ business intelligence platforms — yet this popular generic data visualization platform fails to cover the nuances of legal spend management and often fall short of delivering meaningful insights.
Bodhala provides the solution through Hercules, our proprietary data tool that analyzes rates, practice areas, matter types, matter, and other factors to create peer sets that provide accurate apples-to-apples comparisons when it comes to cost and staffing.
Let’s dig further into why Bodhala is the most powerful end-to-end legal spend management platform.
Quick and Easy Doesn’t Always Mean Insightful
Tableau is a presentation tool, not an analysis tool. Tableau gives you the “what,” but not the “why” and “how.”
With Tableau, you need to not only know where you’re starting but where you’re trying to go. While building simple dashboards on Tableau is easy if you have an admin on staff, legal spend management is relentlessly complex and requires data-backed insights to drive impactful decisions.
Bodhala is a groundbreaking 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 dashboard answers the following questions that your traditional data visualization platforms can’t:
How do firms allocate work to their associates?
How do law firms account for different discounts?
How much time, on average, does each matter take and what does it cost?
How much are you paying compared to the industry rate?
How are your rate cards impacting your total legal spend?
Utilizing Data You Trust
One of the greatest operational challenges Tableau users face is data cleanup. Although the platform was built with big data in mind, Tableau users find it difficult to manipulate and model data in an efficient manner. Some Tableau power users even recommend that data work be done outside of Tableau, and then be imported back into the platform for the best results.
On top of this, they must ensure that the imported data is clean and uniform, which is a process that requires countless hours by your data team to just make sure that everything is tagged appropriately and nothing falls through the cracks.
Bodhala removes this key operational headache with Hercules, the god of all analytics platforms. Hercules’ proprietary suite of data tools helps companies marry legal spend data in a clean, organized, and pain-free way.
Hercules uses machine learning to automatically organize, categorize, and taxonomize your legal data so you’re always working with clean data. The algorithm also detects any major disruptions in data patterns and helps you identify any anomalies within your massive dataset.
Fundamental Data Errors Lead to Bad Behavior
Law firm discounting is complex and difficult to measure through your invoicing platforms. Bodhala’s Hercules engine identifies and simplifies the following structures right out of the box:
Write-offs and task-level discounts
Invoice level discounts
Line item discounts
Relationship discounts
Leveraging Unmatched Business Intelligence
Teams utilizing data visualization tools like Tableau have traditionally relied on 3rd party benchmarks to determine the “best” rates when negotiating with their law firms. Unfortunately, this process doesn’t allow in-house counsel to go into the specifics of how those rates came to be.
Bodhala goes beyond the ‘rack rate’ and provides precise industry benchmarks that work closely with your proprietary data to identify how your legal fees weigh up to industry averages.
Our benchmarks empower teams to make true apples-to-apples comparisons. Unlike publicly available benchmarks, we provide transparency on integral factors like matter-type competitiveness, bankruptcy history, law firm financials, and aggregated client data.
Try Bodhala Today
Real transparency, real accountability, real control.
Creditors and former workers struggle while Big Law firms see the softer side of the Sears bankruptcy.
Over at The Wall Street Journal last week, journalist Soma Biswas illuminated the “tug of war” between former professionals, vendors, and the teams of Big Law firms vying for a piece of the shrinking pie of Sears assets in bankruptcy.
Some of the biggest firms with the biggest price tags have charged more than $200 million in legal bills since Sears went under in late 2018. Sears’ main bankruptcy firm, Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP, maxes out their billing at $1,695 an hour according to the article, and their total payout has been more than $65 million.
In October, a $50 million estate fund was set up to pay creditors. Akin Gump, who represents unsecured creditors, has so far billed for more than half the funds of that pot, while vendors and creditors were paid $21 million in December.
Meanwhile, more than $3 million in severance to former Sears employees remains unpaid.
While these numbers might sound shocking, it’s a trend we’ve seen growing in the legal industry over the last decade. Last summer, WSJ wrote a groundbreaking piece, based largely on data we provided, that examined the changing nature of law firm partnerships and their interactions with clients. In the span of a few decades, white-shoe law firms have transitioned from a relationship-based model to a system where “data and money rule.”
Bodhala can’t keep you out of the headlines but we can keep the headlines from covering your legal spend.
We unlock the power of the data you already own to help your corporate legal department make decisions to keep your company’s legal billing under control – and out of the news! Our machine learning algorithms immediately identify patterns in your legal spend to give you the best three-dimensional view of your billing, giving you the confidence to negotiate from a position of strength in every interaction and enhance your relationship with your trusted outside counsel.
Our platform gives you instant snapshots of every facet in your legal matter, from the number of timekeepers to surfacing the true rate per hour, and staffing diversity.
Bodhala is the leading tech platform enabling corporate legal teams to analyze and optimize their spend. We’re dedicated to helping firms get a handle on their legal spend, regardless of the size and scope of their enterprise, or the matters at hand.
Using the power of big data and machine learning algorithms, our proprietary system helps corporate legal departments find the right talent, at the right value. We’ve saved our clients millions in negotiation and procurement every year, and we’re eager to get to work for you.
Contact us TODAY to find out how we can help you realize more value in your spend: http://bit.ly/37zaM7X
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