Leveraging Legal Analytics and Spend Data as a Law Firm Self-Governance Tool

Our essay has five parts: (i) a discussion of how external forces are reshaping the economics of today’s legal industry; (ii) examples of the types of decisions that tend to drive up the cost of bills in contravention of ethical duties; (iii) a discussion of possible reasons for those decisions (including a short discussion of social science explanations); (iv) a description of how attorneys can use data analytics tools to self-govern how they staff, deliver and bill for their legal services; and (v) recommendations for how both clients and law firms can benefit from proactively managing, on the front end, of legal costs.