The RealReal Elevates Legal Spend Management with Unity ELM

As the world’s largest online marketplace for authenticated luxury resale, The RealReal operates in a fast-moving environment where legal teams must balance efficiency, cost control, and strategic decision-making.

For Adrianne Mooney, Senior Legal Operations Manager at The RealReal, effective legal spend management requires invoice processing and the holistic visibility into outside counsel performance, actionable reporting, and the data to make well-informed decisions.

Using Unity ELM, The RealReal has strengthened billing governance, improved spend transparency, streamlined accrual reporting, and positioned the legal team to take advantage of emerging AI capabilities to meet growing corporate strategy and market demand.

When Adrianne joined The RealReal, she identified opportunities to better leverage the organization’s legal spend management platform, at this time SimpleLegal.

While invoices were being processed, important billing controls and reporting capabilities were not being fully utilized. Invoice write-downs were often handled outside the system through email communications, limiting visibility into savings and reducing the ability to track compliance with outside counsel billing guidelines.

“We weren’t using the system to its full capacity,” Adrianne explained. “If you’re just handling invoice adjustments through email, you’re not tracking the savings.”

At the same time, the legal team wanted greater insight into outside counsel rates, budgeting, accruals, and overall spend trends.

The RealReal expanded its use of Unity ELM to support a more disciplined and data-driven  approach to legal spend management. 

Key initiatives included:

• Implementing billing guidelines and automated review rules 
• Tracking invoice write-downs directly within the platform 
• Managing budgets and accruals more effectively 
• Monitoring outside counsel performance and compliance 
• Leveraging benchmarking data to support rate negotiations 
• Improving reporting and visibility across legal spend 

Today, Unity serves as a central network for spend management, matter oversight,  budgeting, accrual tracking, and outside counsel governance.  

“We utilize SimpleLegal for spend tracking, accruals, managing matters, onboarding and  offboarding outside counsel, budgeting, and leveraging our billing guidelines through the  platform,” Adrianne said.

One of the most impactful changes came from implementing billing guidelines and  automated review rules.  

The RealReal now flags invoices that violate established billing policies, enabling attorneys  and legal operations professionals to identify non-compliant charges before approval.  

The organization also shifted invoice adjustment workflows into the platform, creating  greater visibility into realized savings and improving reporting accuracy.  

“Writing down those bills within the system and capturing those metrics is super critical to  me,” Adrianne noted. 

Onit’s benchmarking capabilities have become an important tool for The RealReal’s  outside counsel management strategy.  

By leveraging the benchmarking and spend data available through Unity ELM, The RealReal  team can compare requested attorney rates against similarly situated firms and  practitioners, bringing objective market intelligence into rate discussions.  

“I love that the system allows you to see the benchmarks of similarly positioned attorneys,”  she said. “I use that as a point of negotiation.” 

Armed with those insights, The RealReal has negotiated rate reductions of 5% to 20% off  standard rates with a number of its firms. The team has also used the data to transition  certain matters to alternative fee arrangements (AFAs), helping control costs while  maintaining strong law firm partnerships and ensuring rates remain aligned with market  standards.

When Onit introduced Unity, The RealReal experienced a smooth activation from the  legacy SimpleLegal environment to the updated interface.  

According to Adrianne, communication throughout the transition was supportive, clear,  and easy to share with impacted stakeholders.  

“The rollout was super seamless,” she said. “The communication was frequent enough  without clogging everybody’s inboxes.” The legal team required little additional training,  and adoption was immediate. 

As AI continues to reshape legal operations, The RealReal is already exploring new  opportunities to automate workflows and uncover deeper insights from legal spend data.  

Adrianne has developed AI-powered workflows that combine Unity reporting with broader  financial reporting processes. One recurring monthly reporting process that previously  required several hours of manual effort has been reduced to about five minutes of work via a custom-build AI agent, significantly streamlining the process.  

She is also exploring ways to measure how AI adoption by outside counsel impacts legal  spend, helping the organization better understand where efficiency gains are being  realized.  

“It’s completely changed the way I work,” Adrianne said. 

For Adrianne, Unity’s greatest strength is its usability. 

Having worked with multiple legal spend management platforms throughout her career,  she believes Unity stands apart because it delivers sophisticated capabilities without  unnecessary complexity. 

“The ease of use sets you apart,” she said. “It’s intuitive, the platform is clean, and it’s even  cleaner now. Attorneys want to get back to lawyer-ing. The interface and ease of use are  key to getting people to adopt the system in the first place.”