Leveraging Data to Drive Legal Department Initiatives

Whether to optimize legal spend or drive diversity efforts, legal operations professionals are leaning on data to accelerate their department’s key initiatives. 

Without data, legal operations teams are left at a standstill, unable to make strategic decisions that create meaningful impact, such as:

• Reallocating spend to optimize savings and meet departmental priorities, like diversity initiatives
• Identifying and controlling the above-inflation growth of rate cards
• Initiating empowered negotiations and conversations with law firms

The need for clean, actionable data has never been more significant as companies grapple to get a hold of their spend after the economic distress Covid has caused and the urgency of diversity initiatives in the vitally important era of Black Lives Matter. 

Bodhala CEO, Raj Goyle, led legal operations professionals from Fortune 500 companies through insightful discussions on the power of data this afternoon during Consero’s Virtual KnowledgeBridge.

Data’s Impact on Spend Management

In-house teams need to allocate their resources towards significant value-drivers. 

That means no more surprise invoices, no more paying A-team prices for C-team legal talent, and no more hiring firms that do not deliver the quality of work or expertise your legal matters need. 

As we heard from attendees, there’s a burning desire to eliminate these issues, but they struggle to wrangle clean data needed to make this a reality. 

One attendee shared that they are hard-pressed to get any data that can help inform decision making.

Though other professionals need to meet certain standards to get a raise in pay, it seems that companies have no choice but to shell out more and more money each year to compensate their legal counsel.

But legal operations professionals are looking to change that.

They want to leverage the power of data to drive law firm negotiations, instead of being idle price takers that are subjected to consistent rate increases. 

Moving the Needle on Diversity with Data

Companies are holding a magnifying glass towards the diversity of their external partners as a result of the overdue and important conversation on racial injustices in America. 

In-house legal departments are looking for concrete data on timekeepers and allocation or origination credit from their law firms that demonstrates their true, honest commitment to diversity and inclusion. 

But it’s not an easy road to obtain this information.

Due to the limitations of their tech stacks, legal operations professionals must rely on their law firms to provide their diversity data — a request that’s almost always refuted.

This leaves legal operations teams struggling to control law firm behaviors and set specific guidelines on outside counsel diversity. 

Data-Backed Insights

With unparalleled data-backed insights, Bodhala can be a critical partner in guiding your legal department’s key initiatives — from diversity to spend optimization, law firm management, enhanced reporting, and more.

As the leading legal technology platform, Bodhala is 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.

Bodhala’s legal market intelligence arms legal departments with the ability to: initiate data-driven negotiations with outside counsel, set outside counsel guidelines that align with the businesses’ core values, benchmark their law firm rates to understand what they’re paying compared to peers in the market, and search data categorized by firmographics.

The combination of our analytics and legal market intelligence has made us experts in diversity spend data. As a result, we’ve helped our clients direct spend to diverse attorneys, monitor origination credit and relationship partner data, and identify diverse counsel for individual matters.

Real transparency, real accountability, real control — that’s what Bodhala is all about.

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Get in touch with our team of legal billing and data experts to find out how Bodhala can transform your legal department.