Category: Legal Operations

Now is the perfect time to evolve Legal’s role and brand image for the path ahead. Here’s how to boldly do so, for the future of Legal and the growth of your business. 

When it comes to the relationship dynamic between Legal and the enterprise as a whole, an irrefutable Perception Paradox exists: While nearly four in five (78%) enterprise employees around the world* view Legal as stellar business protectors and good advisors, only one in four (27%) view Legal as a good business partner.

Corporate employees understand that Legal is just doing its job — and they believe Legal is doing it quite well. In the end, however, true success cannot be attained without inclusivity and collaboration.

Here are five opportunities for Legal to bridge gaps, improve alliances within the enterprise, and jumpstart greater overall impact on material growth, topline revenue generation, and bottom-line efficiency:

1. Evolve the Department of “No”: Although 22% ELR Report respondents consider Legal the “no” police, 48% believe that the department is actively trying to cut red tape, minimize bureaucracy, and help accelerate deal cycles. Legal can capitalize on this perception by making the conscious effort to modernize processes in ways that cultivate further flexibility and adaptation. By challenging legacy paradigms and replacing them with new structures and optimized processes, Legal can find itself asking “How can we help?” far more often than having to say no.
2. Spark Efficiency with Tech: The mainspring and linchpin of a modern legal department is its state-of-the-art technology. By working with corporate IT to drive the implementation and adoption of comprehensive enterprise legal management (ELM) and contract lifecycle management (CLM) solutions, Legal will not only maximize savings, increase operational efficiency, and enhance collaboration, but also introduce and leverage forward-thinking tools that can serve the entire enterprise.
3. Solve the Need for Speed: Artificial intelligence (AI) can provide this impact Legal needs to work both smarter and faster. With automation, Legal can help streamline workflows and integrate data-driven decision making into standard processes, distilling complex and lengthy tasks and enhancing speed by at least 25%. A bonus: When combined with ELM solutions, process automation was found to cut business operating costs by as much as 90%!
4. Bear the Torch for DEI: Most CEOs will tell you that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is of utmost importance to their organization. However, the perception among employee respondents is that much of what is said may not be translating to what is done as only 50% believe DEI is treated as a priority, and barely 25% believe that vendor diversity matters to the enterprise. But if Legal is a protector —and there is no greater purpose in the role of protector than sheltering the heartbeat of an enterprise, its people— this is a distinct advantage to embolden the department with new initiatives of respect, communication, and cooperation. That way, Legal becomes an advocate for empowering the outlooks and opinions of many divergent others, both in the workplace and world at large.
5. Bring the Insight: More than three out of four (76%) enterprise employees feel that Legal manages data security governance well. However, when it comes to security, there is no such thing as half secure or almost secure. Security needs to be 100%, or it simply isn’t secure. With Legal’s involvement in countless confidential and sensitive matters, and with most legal professionals being inherently strategic thinkers, it is a natural leap that this an opportunity for Legal to become more contributory to the company’s data analytics and protection. In doing so, Legal will become a more visible and even more valued business partner, ensuring both the physical protection and cybersecurity of its constituents.

Become the Hero Your Enterprise Needs

As poet Langston Hughes once remarked, “The only way to get a thing done is to start to do it, then keep on doing it.” By aligning and partnering with corporate functions and anticipating how to meet ever-evolving needs, Legal will pivot the Perception Paradox. By championing open communication, resetting expectations, and holding the enterprise to forward-facing standards, Legal can transform its brand and perception on the way to creating a better future, having greater material impact for its businesses, and standing out not for the old reasons but the right ones.

Spark your revolution of evolution today by downloading ELR Report Chapter 1.

*The ELR Report is a third-party, multinational study of 4,000 enterprise employees and 500 corporate legal professionals across the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany intended to showcase relationship dynamics and perceived image between corporate legal teams and enterprise organizations.

Bodhala is excited to announce the launch of Envision — a series of exclusive events in collaboration with our parent company Onit.

Starting with the first event June 21st in Chicago, Envision is an opportunity to meet the rest of the Onit family of companies, hear from product experts, and get a front-row seat to the next generation of innovation in legal tech.

Envision events are free to attend. Click here to register and learn more.

Attendees will also have the chance to network with peers in the Chicago area, and learn how they are working with Onit companies to achieve operational efficiency and build stronger connections between Legal and the rest of the business. 

By the end of the event, attendees will have a clear understanding of how to cost-efficiently and cost-effectively execute legal workflows, with help from Onit’s solutions purpose-built for contract lifecycle management, matter management, e-billing, spend management, analytics, and more.

Envision Chicago Details

Date: June 21, 2022

Location: Union League Club of Chicago – 65 W Jackson Blvd, Chicago, IL 60604

Agenda (All times CDT) 

11:00 AM – 1:00 PM

• Lunch & Demos

1:10 – 3:30 PM (Keynotes)

• Corporate Legal’s Reputation in the Eyes of Internal Clients and Its Opportunity to Materially Impact Enterprise Growth, Topline Revenue, and Bottom Line Efficiency
• Evolving Expectations About Legal’s Business Impact: New Approaches That Connect Legal to the Enterprise Through Better Partnering and Workflows That Matter
• The Roadmap That Makes Legal Work Flow Faster and Smarter: The Next Generation of Automated, AI-driven ELM And CLM Solutions

3:30 – 4:05 PM (Roundtables)

• Session A — Connecting the Enterprise Through Data
• Session B — Top Challenges Solved by SimpleLegal’s Enhanced Reporting

4:15 – 4:55 PM (Roundtables)

• Session A —Rightsizing Contract Management
• Session B — Using Market Intelligence to Improve Business Outcomes

5:00 – 6:30 PM

• Evening Reception

Click here to register for Envision Chicago.

If you can’t make it to Chicago, you can meet us at a future Envision event later this year!

• Envision Los Angeles, CA — August 24, 2022
• Envision London, United Kingdom — September 20, 2022
• Envision Stuttgart, Germany — September 22, 2022
• Envision New York, NY — October 20, 2022

Stay tuned for updates and agendas for future Envision events!

To make the best decision on where to send your next big matter, you need the right data. That’s why we’ve added a brand new offering to Bodhala’s growing arsenal of benchmarking products: Matter Benchmarking. 

Bodhala’s Matter Benchmarking is the first of its kind, providing unparalleled insights into what a matter costs, how many hours were worked, and a deep analysis of staffing and rates — down to the individual task or document. 

Rates will always play a critical role in understanding your costs. But when you peel back a few more layers of the onion, you will find there’s almost always more to the picture than meets the eye. Now with a single click, you can find out not just how many hours it took to create an important document — but also how many hours it should have taken, and how it should be staffed.  

Backed by Bodhala’s proprietary machine learning and AI, this first-to-market solution is truly groundbreaking. Let’s break it down (see what we did there?): 

Bodhala’s New Matter Similarity Model

To make this work, we built a completely new way of comparing matters. Our proprietary matter similarity model uses machine learning and natural language processing to identify similar matters from similar firms. Each pairing is given a similarity score of 1 to 100, indicating the strength of the match. 

The model uses over 10,000 different factors to identify similar matters. Plus, it’s smart – as more matters enter the system, it is constantly improving, identifying new pairings and rescoring old pairings. This ensures matters are always compared to the most relevant set of matters. 

Get Both Internal & Market Benchmarks

Bodhala’s Matter Benchmarking compares your matters not just against similar matters from similar firms across the market, but also to your own internal panel. You may find that certain firms are much more efficient than others across your panel, but that the entire panel is far less efficient than the overall market for similar matters. 

Having both internal and market benchmarks provides you with a unique perspective on your current panel of firms. You can not only improve matter allocation on future matters but also make smarter decisions about how you manage your entire panel. 

Detailed Look at Rates & Hours

Every report breaks down both rates and hours by timekeeper level, comparing those rates and hours to both the market and your panel. Rates are only part of the picture so understanding how the matter was staffed, in addition to your rates, delivers true cost analysis. 

Drill Down Into Tasks & Documents 

Perhaps most exciting — and completely new — is Bodhala’s deep dive benchmarking on individual tasks and documents. Bodhala analyzes every matter, identifying key tasks and documents, and benchmarks those tasks against the market and your panel. 

Stop wondering how many hours that document should take to make — or if it should be handled by partners or associates. Bodhala’s Matter Benchmarking gives you the answers.

By combining rate and staffing analysis with market and panel benchmarks, Matter Benchmarking helps you understand the true “should cost” of upcoming matters while also supporting better matter allocation and panel management. 

Start simplifying your budgeting and counsel selection process today and sign up for a demo. 

Rates for legal services are a black box. Are you getting a good rate? Are you overpaying for partners but getting a deal on associates?  

Historically it has been nearly impossible to know if your rates were market-appropriate. Available benchmarking reports were less-than-accurate, they often didn’t compare apples-to-apples, and they didn’t allow clients to understand the impact of their rates on their spend. 

We’ve got good news. Those days are GONE. 

Introducing Bodhala’s Rate Benchmarking 2.0 – a transparent comparison of your effective outside counsel rates against both the market and your panel – all the way down to the named timekeeper level. 

This new and improved solution delivers what legal departments have been waiting for — accurate benchmarks and usable insights on rates. We enhanced our proprietary rate benchmarks by analyzing cost impact, including estimated rate increases, historical analysis, and much more. 

Budgeting, rate negotiation, and internal reporting just got a whole lot easier! 

Let’s dive into what’s new and improved!

Compare Your Benchmarks from Firm to Firm 

Comparing each firm to the market is important — but understanding how all of your firms compare to each other is also critical. This comprehensive view of your firms’ benchmarks gives you a high-level overview of how your firms stack up against each other and the market, providing health scores for each firm. 

Historical Impact Analysis

Customers often ask us, “If I had paid market-appropriate rates, how would that have impacted my overall spend?” Great question — and now we include the answer front and center. 

We analyze your whole spend across your selected practice area, calculating how much you would have saved overall had your rates been closer to market standards. Then we break it down by timekeeper level, giving you a clear line of sight into the highest impact opportunities at your next rate negotiation.

Named Timekeeper Benchmarks & Cost Analysis

Breaking down benchmarks by timekeeper level is important. But we all know that not all timekeepers are created equal. Every team has its key players — their “Lebrons” — and they usually come at considerable cost. More often than not, superstars are worth the money. But are you being charged superstar prices for utility players? 

With granular benchmarking data about individual timekeepers, you can ensure you’re paying appropriate rates for every timekeeper. 

White-Glove Service & Expert Advisory

What if you don’t have internal resources to focus on benchmarking? Or you want expert advice on how to leverage your benchmarks to drive better outcomes at your next rate negotiation? 

No problem!

Bodhala’s Client Success Team offers white-glove services, including everything from highlighting key savings opportunities and creating sizzle-worthy decks to share with your internal stakeholders, to consulting on tactical strategies for rate negotiation and staffing recommendations. 

Whatever kind of support your team needs to meet your goals, we’ve got you covered.  

Ready to start running legal like a business?

When it comes to your law firm rates, you have more leverage than you realize. You just don’t have the data yet. Fortunately, with new Bodhala’s Rate Benchmarking, it’s now easy to budget smarter, negotiate harder, and get more value from our outside counsel.  

Test drive Rate Benchmarking for FREE!

Not ready to commit? Want to see it in action for free? 

Check out our FREE Rate Benchmarking Report to benchmark any firm in the AmLaw 200 across 10 top practice areas. No commitment, no need to give us a call — just a couple of clicks and you’ll have your benchmark.

GET MY FREE BENCHMARK

Are you overpaying your law firms? What should your upcoming matter cost? Are your law firms delivering the value their rates warrant?

Historically, in-house teams have lacked the transparency and insights needed to answer these questions.

Until now.

Meet Bodhala’s new Benchmarking Solutions — the easiest way to compare your rates and matters against your panel and the market at large. 

With significant improvements to Rate Benchmarking and our brand new Matter Benchmarking solution, corporate legal teams can finally access the market insights necessary to budget smarter, negotiate harder, and save money on outside legal counsel.

Let’s take a look at what’s new!

Rate Benchmarking

Our new and improved Rate Benchmarking delivers what corporate legal leaders have been waiting for – accurate benchmarks coupled with usable insights. Get ready legal ops folks — budgeting, rate negotiation, and internal reporting just got a whole lot easier! 

We enhanced our rate benchmarks by adding named timekeeper benchmarks, cost impact analysis, projected ROI on increase mitigation, and more. 

Compare Your Benchmarks from Firm to Firm

We added an overview of all of your benchmarks, enabling you to easily find and compare your firm benchmarks. This comprehensive view highlights how each firm stacks up against one another and the rest of the market — plus, it makes all of your benchmarks easier to access.

Ratings in red, yellow, and green make it simple to identify where you’re getting a good deal and where you may want to focus your negotiation efforts. 

Historical Impact Analysis

Ever asked yourself, “How much could we have saved if we paid more market-appropriate rates?” 

We thought so. Well, it’s time to stop wondering because Bodhala’s new Rate Benchmarking crunches those numbers for you. 

We analyze your spend with a firm across practice areas, calculating how much you would have saved if your rates were closer to market standards. Seeing those numbers in black and white (or red…) really puts things in perspective, helping you decide if any rate mitigation effort is worth your time.

Named Timekeeper Benchmarks

All timekeepers are not created equal. Sure, you’re willing to pay the big bucks for those star players, but does every partner deserve that “star treatment”? 

Just think of how easy rate review will be when you can simply pull up the benchmarks for all of your individual timekeepers. And when it comes time to select counsel for that big upcoming matter? Break out those named timekeeper benchmarks and quickly identify the highest value player on your roster. 

Matter Benchmarking

With Bodhala’s Matter Benchmarking you’ll get unparalleled insights into what a matter costs, how many hours were worked, and a deep analysis of staffing and rates – down to the individual task or document. 

Matter benchmarks will simplify your budgeting process and help you refine your outside counsel guidelines to ensure you’re never paying more than you should for your matters.  

Get Market and Panel Benchmarks

Matter Benchmarking compares your matters not just against similar matters from similar firms across the market, but also to your own internal panel. 

Having both internal panel and market benchmarks provides you with a unique perspective on your current panel of firms. You can not only improve matter allocation on future matters but also make smarter decisions about how you manage your entire panel. 

Detailed Look at Rates & Hours

Every report breaks down both rates and hours by timekeeper level, comparing those rates and hours to both the market and your panel. Rates are only part of the picture so understanding how the matter was staffed, in addition to your rates, delivers true cost analysis. 

Drill Down Into Tasks & Documents 

Say you’re doing a fund formation and you’re curious how many hours a subscription agreement should really take. Look no further. 

You can stop wondering how many hours that document or task should take – Matter Benchmarking gives you the answers. With benchmarks for hours and staffing ratios, you can keep current matters on track, and budget more effectively for the next one. 

We’re here to help

Bodhala’s Client Success Team offers full white-glove service, from highlighting key savings opportunities to consulting on tactical strategies for rate negotiation or matter staffing — and everything in between.

Ready to start running legal like a business?

When it comes to managing your outside counsel spend, you have more leverage than you realize. You just don’t have the data yet. 

Bodhala’s Benchmarking Solutions put insights at your fingertips, enabling you to make strategic decisions across your legal department – from rates to matters and everything in between.

Ready to give it a spin?

TRY RATE BENCHMARKING FOR FREE!

2021…where do we begin?! This was a monumental year for our business. Awards were won, bigger and bigger deals were closed, new products were released — and we were acquired by a company that you may have heard of (more on all that later!).

While we’re still working remotely, we did get to come together in person on several occasions for meetings, workshops, and dinners — plus one rooftop party for the books. We got to physically meet the faces we see on Zoom every day, reconnect with colleagues we haven’t seen since our office shut down, and finally find out how tall some people really are.

Our people are the foundation of our business. Having all of our brilliant minds together has been nothing short of invigorating.

Now, let’s dive into some of the highlights from the last twelve months!

Acquired by Onit!

It’s no surprise that our biggest news of the year was being acquired by Onit. We officially joined the Onit family of companies as an independent subsidiary in September. 

Onit is the indisputable market leader in enterprise legal management, contract lifecycle management, and business process automation solutions — and we’re looking forward to continuing to usher in a new exciting phase of legaltech together in the years ahead.

With this exciting culmination of many years of hard work, we had to celebrate appropriately. We gathered with nearly all Bodhala employees, as well as many new teammates from Onit, in New York City for an amazing rooftop celebration. It was a great feeling to not only get our team back together after 18 months, but also to meet many of our new Onit family members. It was an apt celebration of success, as well as a strong kick-off to our next chapter!  

We Iterated & Improved

We continued to invest in our product, iterating where necessary and building where we saw the need. Our platform is the lifeblood of our business and we remain devoted to making our user experience better by the day. We’re proud to serve some of the largest companies in the world, helping them achieve their strategic spend priorities.

Thanks to the remote nature of our current work environment, we’ve expanded our talent pool, hiring new Bodhalians from not just around the country but around the world. We’ve grown our Client Success and Product/Data teams this past year, understanding the critical role these two functions play in serving our clients. 

Bodhala was founded to transform the legal industry and be the single source of truth for actionable insights on outside counsel spend. We’re proud to not only be a category creator but be the indisputable leader in this space. 

Released New QBR Program 

Corporate legal departments are increasingly acknowledging the importance of data but don’t exactly know how to get started — and we wanted to help.

We launched our Quarterly Business Review Program in October as an easy way for corporate legal departments to get their feet wet in legal data analytics. Our QBR program gives in-house teams the clarity on their legal spend that’s necessary to make more strategic decisions, impacting both their outside counsel spend and management.

All We Do is Win, Win, Win…

We’re both honored and humbled to see our hard work recognized. In 2021, Bodhala was named:

Overall Legal Analytics Solution of the Year by LegalTech Breakthrough Awards

101 Most Innovative New York Based Machine Learning Companies by Futurology

A New York City Company to Watch in 2021 by Built in NYC

Hot Off the Press

We can’t lie — we love the limelight. 

We’re proud to be a consistent thought leader for the industry, being featured in many mainstream and industry publications, including The Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, Nasdaq’s World Reimagined Podcast, Reuters, VC News Daily Podcast, PE Hub, and many more. You can check out all our press here.

Looking Back

2021 was a transformational year not only for our business but also for the entire legal tech industry. We could not be more excited to carry our momentum into 2022 and continue to drive this major wave of legal tech innovation. But we’re not finished yet! Big goals lie ahead in 2022 but we’re fortunate to have the best and the brightest on our side to help tackle our mission. 

We look forward to bringing you more exciting news in 2022!

Wishing you and yours a happy & healthy holiday season!

– Your friends at Bodhala

It’s no secret that until recently, the word “technology” — or even worse, “AI” — could make in-house teams shudder, perpetuating the industry’s reputation as laggards in terms of technology innovation and adoption. But doing more with less means optimization of daily tasks is no longer a nice-to-have — it’s critical.

So what exactly can we expect to see from the legaltech industry in 2022? Here are some of our predictions:

A Rising Tide Lifts All Ships

Demand for solutions that automate frequent, repetitive tasks and enable workflow and process efficiency continues to fuel significant growth across the sector. 

And because of this growth, 2021 was a monumental year for legaltech. 2021 saw three legaltech unicorns go public, with many others reaching or coming dangerously close to unicorn status. Couple that with growing investment across the industry topping $1B and you’ve got all the makings of a major industry breakout. 

Just a decade ago, you’d be hard-pressed to find any private equity firm with a legaltech company on their balance sheet. Now? They not only have them on their balance sheets, but many have specialized verticals focused on legaltech. If that’s not a harbinger of growth, then what is? 

“The Business of Legal”

2021 was a transformative year for businesses across the board. With some companies still reeling from the economic effects of 2020, many corporate legal departments set out to do more with less in 2021 — with new technologies playing a key role in enabling their success. 

That theme — doing more with less — will drive a bigger trend across the industry: operationalizing and optimizing “the business of legal”. 

What will that mean? Sure, it will definitely lead to software adoption and increased use of analytics, but it will also be the driver of many other trends. 

“The Great Unbundling” 

2021 will continue to accelerate new approaches to getting things done. From ALSPs to other types of providers, alternative solutions for accomplishing tasks will continue to emerge and grow — and there’s an increasing focus on what corporate legal departments can do to allow lawyers to be lawyers. This will be true for both in-house and law firms.

We’re still in the early innings of the legaltech revolution, but the current notion of how certain types of work are executed is under increasing scrutiny. Does an in-house attorney really need to spend their time on discovery work when there are great alternative solutions for that? Nope. 

From states like Utah softening the rules on legal services ownership to the proliferation of ALSPs — both independent and captive — you can expect the “great unbundling” to continue in 2022.

Solution Platformification & Verticalization 

Corporate legal departments know they need to start leaning on technology but the plethora of solutions out there can be overwhelming. Buyer fatigue is real, and organizations don’t want to devote countless hours or resources to onboarding a multitude of vendors.

Leading legaltech organizations are taking note of this and leading the charge on platformification — and acquisitions are playing a major part in that. Just look at our parent company, Onit, who acquired five companies within the past few years — four of them in the past two years alone! Being a “one-stop-shop” for a buyer will continue to be incredibly valuable in 2022.

Aside from platformification, you can expect to see some verticalization in the legaltech space as well. Birds of a feather flock together and organizations want to follow in suit of their peers when it comes to the technology they use. Expect to see legaltech providers honing in on specific verticals as they find their niche market — especially in PE as high finance continues to boom.

The Rise of Legal Ops

So what do all the trends we just mentioned have in common? They create a distinct, and undeniable need for legal operations. 2021 presented corporate legal departments with the need to determine what’s a “nice-to-have” versus what’s a “need-to-have” — and a legal operations function has fallen into the latter. 2022 will solidify that, as more companies bring on legal operations in-house, or outsource it to consultancies or other white-glove services. 

Whether it be to improve the efficiency of the legal department, manage process automation and onboarding, or rein in inflated legal spend — legal operations teams will continue to be an invaluable asset to organizations across the globe. And as businesses continue to be tasked to do more with less, we can expect to see more legal ops professions, departments, and solutions in 2022.   

Here’s to 2022!

Legal services — both in-house and at law firms — is changing rapidly. 2020 presented many new challenges, accelerating the adoption of technology and changing the way the industry works. Innovation is disrupting the status quo, pushing legal departments and firms to take a hard look at how they operate. 2022 will double down on that trend, pushing teams to new heights of operational excellence. 

2021 was a turning point – and 2022? It will solidify legal operations — and the technology behind it — as a driving force of innovation across the industry. And we are extremely excited to help drive the industry into a bright new future! 

Managing outside counsel can sometimes feel like herding cats. There, we said it. Phew. Glad that one’s out in the open.

Maybe you believe one firm is overcharging you on rates, while another is going to town on block billing, and another is staffing partners on tasks a first-year should definitely be doing. You know these things are happening, but do you have hard evidence? Figuring out how to drive meaningful change with your firms can be tough — even simply knowing where to begin is a challenge. 

Smart legal ops teams use, you guessed it, data (!) to manage their outside counsel — and their first stop on the road to crushing department priorities is quarterly business reviews, better known as QBRs. 

QBR meetings give them a platform to discuss performance and rate trends, successes, as well as opportunities for improvement. While it’s of course critical to meet about the meat of your matters, setting aside time to review your business relationship sets you up for success both with your firms, as well as with your internal stakeholders (budget season is coming, amirite?). 

So, what can you expect to get out of a well-prepared QBR? Here are five ways innovative legal ops teams are using their QBRs: 

1. Rate Review

Rate review shouldn’t be a once-a-year task — especially with the sly pricing tricks law firms are known to deploy to rack up their billings. Regular analysis of your law firm’s activity and rates by timekeeper level can ensure that you don’t overpay unnecessarily. 

By surfacing critical data across practice areas and analyzing rates on a quarterly basis, QBRs unearth important trends that can eliminate increases — sometimes even leading to reductions or discounts. QBRs provide the venue to negotiate fair market rates and manage your discounts, regardless of if they’re practice area-specific, volume-related, or otherwise. 

With clear and objective insights under your belt, you can easily open up a data-driven dialogue with your law firms to address any concerns, then start — and win — rate negotiations.

2. Panel Review

Without data on your side, value can be in the eye of the beholder. Consider what you’re paying your firms. Now think about what they’ve done for you in the past year. Are they congruent? Did you truly get what you paid for? How did they stack up against other firms you use in the same practice areas?

We’re guessing you might be feeling a slight wave of regret washing over you. Shake that right off. QBRs are a great fix.

By taking key metrics into account like total outside counsel spend, average hours per matter, and percentage of time block billed, QBRs surface insights on the value your firms deliver and opportunities for value to be maximized. By lining up those metrics against other firms working across the same practice areas — or the same panel — you can begin to see trends that may impact how you allocated work in the future, or even prompt you to change the panel composition.

3. Performance Management 

If you’re like most corporate legal departments we work with, you’re probably paying a partner for something a first-year associate should be doing. We emphasize “probably” because it’s nearly ubiquitous — Bodhala sees this behavior across nearly every firm. We like to call it “partner hoarding”. Some firms are more egregious than others, but it truly impacts your budget when it’s happening on a regular basis. 

With cost-cutting a constant priority for corporate legal departments, QBRs are a great way to easily help correct this problem.

Digging into activity across your practice areas can highlight key metrics, such as average partner hours, average associate hours, and your partner to associate ratio. By clearly highlighting key trends, such as partners logging significant hours on routine work or firms exceeding their associate ratio, you can determine where exactly you need to course-correct and rein in the unnecessary dollars being spent.

4. Reporting to Internal Stakeholders

Many legal departments are feeling the heat from the C-suite to cut costs and run their departments more like a ‘business’. We all know that reporting to internal stakeholders can become a real pain in the…you know what. For many corporate legal departments, reporting capabilities are stuck in the 1990s, leaving them to conduct manual analysis and pore over spreadsheets.

QBRs place all the data that in-house teams need at their fingertips — often in a format that they can pass along to internal stakeholders without any edits or changes. 

Your QBRs should deliver in-depth analysis and actionable recommendations – which can be tough without appropriate software or a robust legal ops team. Setting yourself up with a top-tier legal analytics platform (cough, cough…Bodhala…!) can be the difference between easy-breezy and hours of work. That said, the work is worth the impact and the ability to pass a nice, neat package to the finance department. 

5. Gut-Checking Large Matters

Law firms often claim forecasting a budget for upcoming matters is an impossible feat, citing a lack of precedent or the “unique nature” of every matter. Sure, not every matter is cookie-cutter, but there are absolutely trends. Just like you can dig into historical legal precedent, you can also dig into historical cost precedent. 

A great QBR will drill into top matters from the past quarter and highlight key metrics that you should watch in the future. Even without a sophisticated legal billing analytics engine, keeping a record of such historical analysis can be incredibly helpful in projecting costs — everything from setting expectations around hours and tasks to rates.  

Having this information on hand helps in-house teams gut-check future matters of similar volume and complexity. Not only that, but great QBRs should offer the opportunity to make the appropriate changes needed to rein in extraneous expenses and keep your budget in check, such as revisiting how work is allocated, renegotiating your practice area discount, or updating your outside counsel guidelines to eliminate unreasonable billings. 

Sophisticated Reporting + White Glove Service = Better Business Outcomes

Data-driven conversations are foundational to the success of not only your law firm relationships but your entire legal department. 

QBRs are a great opportunity for in-house teams to get their feet wet in legal data analytics and see how transparency — and even just incremental change – can drastically reduce your legal spend and eliminate budget overages. Transparency itself can often be a major catalyst. Ever notice that when someone knows you’re watching, they start acting differently? QBRs can produce that same effect, known as the Sentinel Effect — let them know big brother is in the building, and they’ll clean up their act. We wrote a whole piece about it — check it out.

If you’re resource-constrained or you don’t have a legal ops team, don’t worry. We got you. You don’t have to be a data scientist for QBRs to transform your legal department — that’s our job :). 

Ready to learn more? Get in touch with our team to discuss our QBR Program and the savings that await!

The annual awards program recognizes Bodhala as Overall Legal Analytics Solution of the Year

Bodhala, the leading provider of AI-powered legal spend analytics, benchmarking and market intelligence, today announced the company has been named winner of the “Overall Legal Analytics Solution of the Year” award in the second annual LegalTech Breakthrough Awards.

Bodhala is at the forefront of creating better technology services to improve the legal market. Bodhala’s platform optimizes buy-side legal spend while also creating the transparency necessary to drive competition and foster innovation across the legal industry.  

With over $20 billion dollars worth of invoice data as well as publicly available and proprietary third-party data, Bodhala’s machine learning engine delivers actionable insights informed by the market. Bodhala’s solutions give corporate legal departments an unparalleled grasp on the legal work being performed so they can determine the value their law firms provide for the rate they’re being paid.

General counsels and their legal ops teams, spanning from mid-cap to Fortune 500s, can tap into digestible data and benchmarks to accurately compare and contrast their outside legal work while also evaluating work within individual firms and across panels.

“We founded Bodhala with the belief that great legal talent should come at market-driven prices, and we’re incredibly proud to have built the most powerful solution on the market for legal spend analytics. This award from LegalTech Breakthrough reinforces our role in tackling the longstanding, unchallenged and one-sided marketplace,”  said Raj Goyle, CEO and co-founder of Bodhala.

The mission of the annual LegalTech Breakthrough Awards program is to conduct the industry’s most comprehensive analysis and evaluation of the standout technology companies, solutions and products in the legal technology industry today. This year’s program attracted more than 1,300 nominations from over 12 different countries throughout the world. In 2020, Bodhala was recognized by the awards program as “Legal Spend Management Innovation of the Year.”

“The legal industry’s lack of transparency has been a huge elephant in the room. Legal teams need deeper insights that allow them to better analyze, interpret and optimize outside counsel spend at competitive and market-driven rates,” said Bryan Vaughn, Managing Director of LegalTech Breakthrough Awards. “Bodhala is the first tech company to apply machine learning and AI to legal billing data to bring clarity to the billable hour and real economics to the market. 

Bodhala recently announced that it has been acquired by Onit, the leading provider of enterprise workflow and artificial intelligence platforms and solutions. By joining forces, the businesses create the most complete enterprise legal management solutions on the market, allowing corporate legal departments to evolve analytics into actionable intelligence to optimize outside counsel spend.

About Bodhala

Bodhala, the leading legal spend analytics and management platform, provides corporate legal departments with in-depth analytics and spend optimization solutions based on real-time market intelligence. Powered by machine learning and AI, Bodhala transforms messy data into actionable, high-impact insights to help companies save up to 20% on their outside counsel spend. The company, an independent subsidiary of Onit since 2021, serves clients across the Fortune 500 and critical services economy industries. Bodhala was named a LegalTech Breakthrough Award Winner for Legal Spend Management Innovation in 2020 and 2021, and One to Watch in Legal Technology by the Financial Times. For more information, visit bodhala.com.

About LegalTech Breakthrough
Part of Tech Breakthrough, a leading market intelligence and recognition platform for global technology innovation and leadership, the LegalTech Breakthrough Awards program is devoted to honoring excellence in legal technologies, services, companies and products. The LegalTech Breakthrough Awards program provides a forum for public recognition around the achievements of LegalTech companies and solutions in categories including Case Management, Client Relations, Data and Analytics, Documentation, Legal Education, Practice Management, eDiscovery and more. For more information visit LegalTechBreakthrough.com

Data-driven conversations are pivotal to successful law firm management and relationships — and for many smart legal departments, it all starts with quarterly business reviews (or QBRs).

That’s why we are launching the Bodhala QBR Program: to simplify the process for those already doing it and jumpstart a critical best-practice activity for those who aren’t. 

Using data to make better, more strategic decisions on key management issues, like rate review and panel review, has become table stakes for many corporate legal departments — and the trend is growing. Bodhala’s QBR Program will turn a cumbersome, seemingly never-ending task into a piece of cake, from start to finish. 

And the best part? It’s a completely white-glove service. By leveraging our advanced machine learning and AI, coupled with detailed analysis from our team of data scientists and legal industry experts, Bodhala QBRs deliver deep analysis and actionable recommendations, giving you the tools you need to effectively manage your objectives. 

So what do you get with Bodhala QBRs? We’re glad you asked.

1. Full Transparency & Trend Spotting 

By surfacing critical data and analyzing it across practice areas and firms on a quarterly basis, QBRs unearth important trends across important metrics like partner and associate rates, work allocation, and block billing. Detailed insights provide detailed insights on your law firms’ performance over time, highlighting areas you need to keep an eye on. 

2. Actionable Insights & Improved Reporting

Our QBR Program surfaces critical insights and provides you with clear recommendations for how to improve your desired outcome – whether it be negotiating a better rate, improving task-to-talent alignment, and everything in between. 

3. ROI Projections

Specific ROI estimates accompany each QBR recommendation. Designed to be easy to execute, with a clear associated value, you have a direct line of sight to the impact of your actions. 

You can be confident in the results – and the knowledge that you will be able to manage your budget more strategically. 

As pressure for accountability and proactive budget management continues to trickle down from the C-suite, data is no longer a nice-to-have but a need-to-have for corporate legal departments. Regular, data-driven conversations with your key stakeholders and law firms will not only set the foundation for stronger partnerships but will be a catalyst for better results. 

The Bodhala QBR Program will give you the tools you need to not only save time, money, and improve your outside counsel management. You will also be completely prepared to “wow” the internal stakeholders demanding visibility into your spend. 

So what are you waiting for? 

Book a demo with our team of legal experts to get started!