Despite trends that point toward “moving a steady majority of their legal budgets towards internal legal resources”, corporate legal spend on outside counsel is still significant. According to the ACC Law Department Management Benchmarking Report, the median outside spend on outside counsel and ALSPs is $1.8 million. Also, studies such as the 2025 ACC Chief Legal Officers Survey and Axiom’s latest flash survey indicate the amount of work sent to outside counsel may increase due to staffing shortages and increasing legal demand due the rapid pace of corporate change and disruption. At the same time, firms’ rates continue to increase at a significant pace. The combination of these factors is creating problems for cost-conscious general counsel and legal operations leaders, and helps explain why legal teams are monitoring outside spend more closely and seeking innovative ways to control costs.

Legal spend management and e-billing software helps control outside counsel costs

Legal technology like spend management and e-billing software can digitize your invoice management processes and includes key features to automate legal invoice review, which has three primary cost-related benefits:

• Increasing operating efficiency reduces the internal cost associated with manual invoice review and approval processes.

• Speeding up invoice handling overall and automating RFP workflows increases opportunities for early pay discounts and competitive bidding.

• Spend management solutions generate valuable data that reveal opportunities to save – for example, informing negotiations with firms and decisions about whether to reallocate, consolidate or shift work in-house.

Outside Counsel Billing Guidelines and approved timekeeping rates are essential spend management and cost control tools

Creating Outside Counsel Billing Guidelines (OGCs) is a common practice to enhance client/firm relationships and help control costs.Simply put, OGCs are documents that outline expectations for law firms, including invoicing formats, timekeeper rates, expense limitations, and other relevant aspects of the billing process. Approved timekeeper rates refer to the hourly rates for legal professionals (timekeepers) that a legal department has agreed to pay.

Among the benefits of using OGCs for in-house legal operations are:

• Creates a way to avoid overpayment: invoice reviewers can identify and correct erroneous charges per the agreed OCGs and rates, leading to significant cost savings.

• Transparency and accountability: guidelines can help in-house teams understand where legal costs are incurred and have data to hold outside counsel accountable for performance and compliance.

• Better relationships through data: OCGs enable organizations to set expectations up front and then use data to make informed decisions about legal spend allocation, as well as have better conversations to improve compliance and negotiate future arrangements.

When legal teams can effectively monitor compliance with guidelines as part of an efficient invoice review process, the benefits of having OCGs is significantly amplified. In fact, enforcing billing guidelines ranked as the third most effective cost control measure in the 2024 Legal Operations Index Report.

The problem: Legal invoice review and enforcing billing guidelines are challenging for in-house teams

For corporate teams, managing outside counsel guidelines starts with establishing and documenting clear expectations for law firms, including billing, staffing and communication. Ideally, invoices can be reviewed quickly and accurately for compliance against these agreements. This process naturally creates overhead for in-house teams, but the benefits should outweigh the effort – especially if legal invoice review and enforcing compliance can be automated. When this is possible, two things happen:

• Enforcing compliance with guidelines and timekeeper rates can result in real cost savings, as discrepancies are flagged for review and rejection – which is extremely time consuming and difficult to achieve with manual processes

• Automation generates valuable data – so even if invoices are reviewed and approved with discrepancies, data is available for negotiations, discussions and reviews of guidelines, firms and legal service providers at a later date. This can result in better outcomes for corporate legal teams

Fortunately, many legal spend and enterprise legal management platforms include features that help legal operations teams speed up invoice review, detect discrepancies and enforce compliance of outside counsel guidelines. As always with legal technology, the question for legal teams who are squeezed for time and resources is: does the technology deliver enough value, fast enough, to be worth the cost of the subscription and the effort of the team?

LawVu’s innovative approach to its AI-powered Billing Guideline Review unlocks more value from legal spend management software

LawVu intensified the focus on its suite of spend management capabilities in 2024, resulting in major advancements which have earned industry recognition. Now, we announce the addition of another new feature: AI-powered Billing Guideline Review, currently available in Early Access. This cutting-edge feature set for legal invoice review and spend management will help in-house legal teams:

• Detect invoice discrepancies with real-time AI-driven analysis.

• Accelerate review and enforce billing compliance by automatically flagging non-adherent charges.

• Automate communications with legal service providers and finance teams.

• Get immediate access to analytics to uncover opportunities to control spend and improve operations.

Suggested article: How to reduce your legal spend in three steps

Here’s what sets LawVu’s AI-powered Billing Guideline capabilities apart:

The latest features in LawVu’s spend management software suite deliver the same outcomes promoted by legacy e-billing solutions, but with lower administrative overhead and greater efficiency. This means legal teams can achieve cost control and manage spend better with less effort.

Here’s how LawVu delivers unique value:

• AI-powered simplicity: Many existing tools require heavy lifting to create, manage and monitor rule sets for compliance with OCGs and agreed timekeeper rates, whereas LawVu customers can simply upload their billing guidelines documents and agreed rates to the legal workspace. Once uploaded, modern and secure AI and machine learning capabilities do the work to extract information and create categorized rules which can be used to flag invoice discrepancies. This process works on all invoices – .pdf or LEDES – which means legal teams can review a majority of their invoices for compliance, whereas some legacy systems only accommodate LEDES invoices.

• Batch invoice review for faster workflows: While reviewing invoices for compliance one at a time is easier when discrepancies are flagged for you, this traditional method can still take up more valuable time than it needs to. LawVu’s innovative approach gives invoice reviewers an intuitive interface to evaluate invoices from their legal service providers in bulk – making it faster and easier to get through reviews and communicate with finance and firms about approved and declined payments.

• Out-of-the-box reporting: A new set of interactive dashboards is available in real time to make it easy to identify savings, patterns of non-compliance and insights that improve operations, without burdensome report creation or specialist skills.

• The legal workspace advantage: LawVu is the category-defining legal workspace, where spend management capabilities are available in a unified interface with industry-leading internal matter management and contract lifecycle capabilities. This easy-to-use integrated platform lets legal teams manage more than spend, saving valuable time and generating a consolidated data set that makes it easier to prove value and improve operations.

 How LawVu’s AI-powered Billing Guideline Review saves in-house teams time and money

Below are six key features included with this brand-new capability, features that customers in the early access program can now begin using. As always, customer feedback and a commitment to evaluating the accuracy and quality of AI outputs will influence the final feature experience.

Simple file upload for billing guidelines and approved timekeeper rates

All you have to do is upload existing documents and files to your central repository in the LawVu legal workspace. They’ll always be available for reference and can easily be kept up to date. AI automatically extracts data to create categorized rules according to your guidelines and approved timekeeper rates, so they can be compared to invoices. Because your guidelines are associated with each firm or LSP in the system, when their invoices are uploaded, rules and rates for that provider are matched in real time.

A provider’s profile in the LawVu legal workspace, with key information, billing guidelines and approved timekeeper rates included

Use billing guideline templates to get started

If you don’t have your own guidelines, you can use our best practice template to create them – which means you can get started on your compliance and savings journey quickly and easily.

AI-powered automated discrepancy detection

Because AI has already extracted data from your guidelines and created rule sets, as each invoice is uploaded, AI scans for discrepancies. It does this by automatically comparing your guidelines with each invoice and batch submitted, generating flags and highlighting discrepancy details. This works on any invoices loaded to the system, whether they are LEDES or .pdf.

Batch and individual reviews

Your primary approver is notified when a batch of one or more invoices is uploaded. Once in LawVu, they can easily see all uploaded invoices, along with details about discrepancies and potential savings in a single interface. There, they can take action to approve, decline or adjust – first in batches, which makes for a more efficient review and communication process, and then at the individual invoice level if preferred. This lets the reviewer move quickly as they have key information at their fingertips about matter budgets, guideline violations and more.

A unified view of all invoice batches that have been uploaded and reviewed for discrepancies with AI

Automated communications to LSP and Finance

As you choose to accept or decline discrepancies and approve invoices for payment, information is captured in the system and emails are automatically generated to your firms/LSPs and your finance team. This means everyone gets the same information about what’s approved and what will be paid. There’s no extra effort required to send emails or sync information, and everyone gets critical information faster. Again, this automation is applied to entire batches of invoices to save time and effort.

Out-of-the-box billing insights dashboard

Data is collected and available in real time, making it easy to see billing and approved timekeeper discrepancies in bulk and track patterns and behaviors over time, –meaning you can have data-driven conversations, monitor savings and drive spend strategy.

How to get started

If you’re a LawVu customer and are currently utilizing our spend management features, simply reach out to your LawVu representative, or use the 24/7 support chat feature to get a demo and inquire about joining our early access program. If you’re not currently using LawVu’s spend management capabilities, book a demo to discover how the LawVu legal workspace can save your team valuable time, effort and money.