Spend management and e-billing are fast becoming critical priorities for in-house legal teams. Legal departments are under pressure to deliver more with less – mitigating risk, controlling costs, and acting as strategic partners who drive measurable business value. Yet one persistent obstacle continues to undermine these expectations: reliance on manual spend management processes and the absence of modern e-billing software.

New IDC research reveals that legal teams spend 1.6 hours daily on manual invoice management, approvals and reporting, and recovering this time equates to roughly USD$10,000 per year in productivity gains. Yet too many legal departments still rely on fragmented processes, manual reviews and disconnected systems. The cost of doing so is no longer sustainable. IDC describes this underinvestment in purpose-built technology as legal friction – the inefficiencies, delays and unnecessary costs that ripple across the business and weaken legal’s credibility.

As Devon Baldwin, Principal Customer Success Manager at LawVu, said during a recent webinar: “Underinvestment in tech drains time, impacts budget control, and hinders legal’s ability to operate as a strategic partner to the business.”

The takeaway is clear: In 2025, an integrated spend management tool is no longer optional. It is essential for controlling costs, improving efficiency and enabling legal to deliver the strategic impact the business demands.

The high cost of legal friction

The IDC research paints a stark picture:

• Time lost: Legal professionals spend an average of 1.6 hours per day on manual invoicing, approvals and reporting – equivalent to a full workday each week
• Budget risk: Only 26 percent of legal departments use dedicated spend management or e-billing tools, meaning most are reliant on spreadsheets or finance systems with little to no tracking
• Capacity constraints: 55 percent of business leaders admit to hiring outside counsel simply because their in-house team lacked capacity
• Missed value: IDC estimates 17 percent of outsourced work could be handled internally with the right tools – equivalent to USD$310,000 in avoidable annual costs

The challenges of manual spend management are well known:

• Time wasted chasing invoices, data and approvals through email and spreadsheets – with constant risk of things slipping through the cracks
• Budget overruns or invoices exceeding estimates
• No tracking or reporting, leaving teams scrambling to answer questions or forecast spend
• No visibility across internal vs external work, making it difficult to optimize resources
• Collaboration bottlenecks, where documents are hard to share securely and valuable advice is lost in back-and-forth with outside counsel
• No way to enforce billing guidelines, track compliance or benchmark firm performance

As Devon highlighted in the webinar: “The cost component, while significant, is just part of the picture. It’s also about the missed opportunity to keep work and knowledge inside the business where it can deliver even more value.”

One of the greatest frustrations for legal leaders is the lack of real-time visibility. Without centralized tools, invoices sit in inboxes or finance systems, leaving legal blind until finance flag overruns at quarter-end. “When you’re flying blind and don’t have insight, you’re essentially managing via guesswork,” Devon said.

The risks are real:

• Budgets overrun before issues are spotted
• Forecasting accuracy erodes
• Teams overspend on outside counsel without clarity as to what could be handled internally
• Business partners view outside counsel as the experts and legal as a cost center

From chaos to control: centralizing legal spend in a unified workspace

The alternative is clear: centralize spend management in a purpose-built in-house legal workspace. By consolidating spend, matters, contracts and all legal work in one system, teams gain real-time transparency, security, rich data and can act proactively rather than reactively.

Key benefits of spend management and e-billing in an integrated legal workspace include:

Efficiency

• Faster invoice review cycles and reduced administrative burden
• AI and automation streamline workflows and eliminate manual reviews and data entry

Visibility and context

• Centralized invoices and data in a secure e-billing repository
• Real-time dashboards and reporting provide clarity on budgets, active matters and forecast accuracy
• Searchable intelligence puts answers at your fingertips

Accountability and collaboration

• Enforceable billing guidelines that hold firms accountable.
• Secure document sharing, embedded conversations, and shared status updates reduce email clutter
• Bulk RFPs and scope management align budgets with firm collaboration.
• Transparent reporting strengthens trust with finance and leadership

As Cecile du Preez, Senior Product Manager at LawVu, noted: “By bringing everything into one workspace, you remove silos and create one source of truth.”

Spend management doesn’t live in isolation. When contracts, matters, and billing are managed in separate tools, legal ends up with data silos and workarounds. LawVu’s unified legal workspace eliminates this by consolidating everything in one platform:

• One user experience instead of multiple systems to learn and switch between
• Securely centralized data linking spend with all legal work
• Rich, real-time dashboards to inform faster, more confident decisions

How to use data to take control of legal spend

Controlling legal spend starts with better use of data. Too often, invoices are scattered across emails, finance systems, and spreadsheets, leaving legal teams without visibility into budget burn-down.

By managing all outside counsel invoices, budgets, and matters in a single platform built specifically for in-house legal teams – and linking them directly to matter management – legal gains the real-time context needed to see what work is driving costs, with insights, visual dashboards and reporting to share with stakeholders and business leaders to drive conversations and inform smarter decisions.

The result: Predictable budgets with fewer overruns, faster invoice reviews, less administrative burden, stronger accountability from law firms, and greater trust with finance and leadership thanks to transparent, data-driven reporting.

Why 2025 is the turning point – and how AI gives legal the advantage

Centralization has long been the foundation of effective legal operations, but in 2025 the true differentiator is artificial intelligence. Axiom reports that 76% of corporate legal teams are significantly increasing AI budgets to capitalize on productivity gains. That’s why AI automation is seamlessly embedded in LawVu – optimizing every legal workflow and transforming spend management and e-billing from reactive cost control into proactive, strategic enablement.

LawVu’s spend management AI brings automation and consistency to some of legal’s most time-consuming tasks. With AI-powered invoice extraction, key data is automatically pulled from PDF invoices, eliminating manual entry, reducing errors and ensuring clean data for analysis.

At the same time, AI-powered billing guideline review enforces rules continuously once they’re uploaded, instantly flagging discrepancies and making it easy to resolve issues with outside counsel while generating analytics that reveal broader trends. The result is significant time savings from automated compliance checks, consistent application of billing rules across all matters, and a simple, intuitive experience that requires no prompt engineering or technical setup.

As Devon Baldwin emphasized: “The significant thing about AI is that it enables you not to spend time manually going and doing things – it serves up the data for you at the right points in the journey.”

Beyond compliance, AI-powered insights help legal teams:

• Maintain and track law firm compliance

• Spot spend patterns that inform smarter resourcing

• Present data-driven ROI and cost-saving trends to leadership

LawVu’s Workspace Intelligence™ AI is designed to enhance every aspect of your legal operations – matters, contracts and spend management – by embedding AI-powered efficiency directly into your workflows – explore the full suite of AI features here.

Ready to take the next step?

Gartner reports that in 2025 nearly half of legal departments will increase their spending on outside counsel and services. This shift places even greater importance on effective legal service provider management, spend management and e-billing to prevent cost overruns and ensure accountability. For corporate legal teams, the message is clear: modernization is no longer optional, as manual processes simply cannot keep pace with growing demand and complexity.

As Devon summarized: “If you have the right tools, you’ll have the right data to make the right calls. Even if you’re not reducing invoices, at least you have the information to optimize your workload and go back to firms and have those conversations.”

In 2025, spend management isn’t just about cutting costs, it’s about equipping legal to operate with the speed, insight and authority the business demands. Don’t wait until budget overruns or missed opportunities force change, download our free guide, Six Signs You Need an In-House Legal Spend Management Solution, to assess your current state and see how a unified legal workspace like LawVu can transform your department.

Not sure where your team stands? Book a personalized consult to discuss your needs and see the LawVu legal workspace in action.