End-to-End Legal Spend Management

Clients both large and small have often found themselves unable to effectively push back against legal bills that do not comply with their guidelines, reflect inefficiencies, or exceed the scope of services requested. Verdant Analytics puts businesses in the driver’s seat to reduce their legal spend and promote more efficient legal service going forward.

How does Verdant Analytics accomplish legal spend savings for clients? By incorporating patented quality management, operational expertise, and scalability of resources to help clients design, execute, and operationalize an effective legal spend management program, including providing the resources necessary for complete invoice review and analytics.

Legal Invoice Review

Our comprehensive legal invoice review process begins with expert evaluation of all invoices for adherence to billing guidelines. Our service ensures validating all billed rates, reviewing UTBMS coding and time entries for accuracy, and addressing all appeals of non-compliant reductions regardless of size of invoice or timeframe. By providing audit of all outside counsel legal invoices - including every line item - for compliance to billing guidelines and UTBMS coding, we are able to supply specific and compelling grounds for the reduction of payable legal costs.

In addition to highlighting all billing guideline variances, our review will identify other billing issues, including:

• Variances from budgetary scopes, including with respect to specific phases of matters
• Expenditures by outside counsel specific to matters, task codes, vendors, and individual time-keepers
• Potentially excessive daily billing
• Other non-compliant billing practices, including block billing, administrative tasks, vague task descriptions, improper expense charges, lack of expense documentation, etc.

Not only does this mean lower bills for our clients, but their in-house legal teams are freed up to focus on more strategic, non-administrative matters. Our work also promotes outside counsel compliance with billing guidelines and best practices, leading to less invoice revisions, more efficient performance by outside counsel, and improved spend data accuracy over time.

Developing Billing Procedures

Our team’s comprehensive review of billing guidelines and legal invoices on behalf of individual clients provides us with the groundwork to help those clients improve their internal processes to reduce inefficient legal spend going forward.

We accomplish this by assisting clients in developing new and/or more robust billing guidelines and enforcement mechanisms. Our team can adapt to any internal billing platform in use by our clients, or we can develop a custom billing process on their behalf.

Incorporating Spend Reporting and Predictive Modeling

One of the many ways that sets Verdant Analytics apart from other outside consultants is our ability to use the legal spend data we collect and analyze from individual clients to assess their current spend patterns and outside counsel billing behaviors and to create predictive modeling to help guide their outside legal spend decisions going forward.

Historical spend analysis can provide valuable insights into how you are deploying your financial resources by type of matter, region, business unit, law firm, etc.

Using predictive modeling, we assist clients in setting budgetary goals and expectations for use both internally and externally. This process includes the evaluation of matter and task-specific costs which helps clients establish budgets, proposals, and billing arrangements with outside counsel in current and future matters.

Additionally, through our predictive modeling, we are also able to assist in-house counsel in selecting outside counsel for a given matter, by providing detailed information pertaining to the relative probability of a selection of outside firms to meet budget expectations on the specific matter.