Ways to Reduce Outside Counsel Spend

According to a survey conducted by LegalBillReview.com, almost every in-house legal team is desperate to reduce the amount spent on outside counsel. Managing outside counsel spend enhances your law department’s credibility within the company, making you more valuable and less likely for budget slashing. 

Seeking cost-saving solutions may seem like an easy task, but it can actually be quite challenging. For a more viable way to reduce outside counsel spend, take a look at our approach below.

Evaluate Resources  

It is important to ensure that only the right work is reaching the desks of outside counsel. This will mean something different to every company, but the factors to consider are specialization, complexity, risk, and scope.

Automate What you Can

Legal departments often spend too much time completing tasks that don’t necessarily require a law degree to complete. These requests are typically low-risk, low-complexity, and often repetitive that have no business taking up unnecessary time. 

There are hundreds of systems out there that are designed to complete these timely tasks for you quickly and error free. Typically, all it takes is a bit of organizing, standardization and implementation.

Set a Budget 

Budgets help you benchmark and control spending with ballpark figures. Once you are operating within a budget, you start to question how much certain vendors cost and whether or not they are earning their keep. Start by looking at expenses from previous years to set ballpark figures/estimates. Next, you should talk to people from other departments to spot issues that may affect spending. And lastly, ask your vendors what the costs for upcoming matters will look like.

Track Performance Through KPIs

Measuring KPIs enables businesses to understand the performance and health of their team so that critical adjustments can be made to achieve strategic goals. Knowing and measuring the right KPIs will help achieve results faster and more effectively. Legal teams create huge amounts of value for an organization, but that story is often lost through ineffective communication. Lawyers think in paragraphs, executives think in metrics. If lawyers can’t convert their ideas and activities into a framework their colleagues can understand, then their story goes untold.

Using software to manage legal spend is one of the best lines of defense against rising legal costs. For more legal software solutions, consider an automation tool like LeasePilot to improve efficiencies with lease drafting and time management. 

To learn more about LeasePilot and get the latest on commercial real estate trends