I know I'm arriving very late to this thread, but F500 companies overwhelmingly turn to outside counsel for their legal needs. There is inhouse legal staff that review the work done by outside counsel, approve bills, and negotiate retainer agreements, but by far the majority work is done by outside counsel.
At the enterprise level, legal spend analysis is a huge deal, and yes the existing tools for electronic billing are really clunky (I work in this space).
%-saved is really hard to accurately calculate on a legal bill. Often inhouse counsel will negotiate a "discount" with an outside firm (yay savings!), but then that firm will overbill to make up the difference, and may do so in ways that aren't really detectable even by "machine learning". For example, they can pad their hours or add extra staff to the matter, or add some mysterious disbursements, or hell just raise their base rates next year to make up the difference. Who is to say that "REVIEW AND DISCUSS LEASE CONDITIONS AND DISCUSS SAME WITH CLIENT" should have taken 2 hours instead of 4? (A real example I just pulled from a real LEDES file).
I did a report for a F500 company a few years ago that showed that after the switch from paper to electronic billing, savings increased (in the form of discounts and auto-adjustments made by our rules engine), but overall spend increased anyway (in the form of increased fees and hours billed). So I'm not really sure that this is a problem that can be fixed by technology. People are gaming the system on both sides of the transaction.
At the enterprise level, legal spend analysis is a huge deal, and yes the existing tools for electronic billing are really clunky (I work in this space).
%-saved is really hard to accurately calculate on a legal bill. Often inhouse counsel will negotiate a "discount" with an outside firm (yay savings!), but then that firm will overbill to make up the difference, and may do so in ways that aren't really detectable even by "machine learning". For example, they can pad their hours or add extra staff to the matter, or add some mysterious disbursements, or hell just raise their base rates next year to make up the difference. Who is to say that "REVIEW AND DISCUSS LEASE CONDITIONS AND DISCUSS SAME WITH CLIENT" should have taken 2 hours instead of 4? (A real example I just pulled from a real LEDES file).
I did a report for a F500 company a few years ago that showed that after the switch from paper to electronic billing, savings increased (in the form of discounts and auto-adjustments made by our rules engine), but overall spend increased anyway (in the form of increased fees and hours billed). So I'm not really sure that this is a problem that can be fixed by technology. People are gaming the system on both sides of the transaction.