The episode discusses the impact of megamatters on law department budgets and spend
Some of the most piercing insights into corporate legal department spend contained in Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions’ third LegalVIEW Insights report are given top billing during an episode of the Electronic Discovery Reference Model’s (EDRM) Illumination Zone podcast. The well-regarded legal standards and practices organization speaks with ELM Solutions’ Director of Legal Operations and Industry Insights Nathan Cemenska about the impact that megamatters, or matters that accrue more than $1 million in lifetime spend, can have on law department budgets.
Citing figures sourced from ELM Solutions’ LegalVIEW database – which at more than $150 billion in invoices remains the most comprehensive legal spend database in the world – Cemenska notes that megamatters comprise 61% of total law department spend and can often have significant implications for the size of future legal bills. “If your spend on matters over $1 million in lifetime spend goes up by even $1, there’s an 89% chance that your total outside counsel spend is going to rise as well. This is the elephant in the room that corporate legal departments need to address,” he says.
But first, departments need to take a closer look at both how and where they are spending. On the Illumination Zone podcast, Cemenska tells EDRM’s CEO Mary Mack and Chief Strategy Officer Kaylee Walstad that many in-house legal ops teams have already begun to extensively analyze their spending data – especially the information collected by invoice review tools such as ELM Solutions’ AI-powered LegalVIEW BillAnalyzer.
“E-billing and invoice solutions allow you to extract a wide variety of useful and strategic insights from the work your vendors are performing,” he notes.
In conjunction with the LegalVIEW Insights reports, ELM Solutions is producing an ongoing series of LegalVIEW Insights blogs, webinars and other content discussing the emerging trends from the LegalVIEW Data Warehouse, which recently crossed the threshold of more than $150 billion in legal invoices. Earlier this year, ELM Solutions released the first and second installments in its continuing LegalVIEW Insights report series.
