Key Challenges

Prior to adopting Brightflag, interviewees had used an alternative enterprise legal management solution for upward of 10 years. However, the solution offered limited capabilities for invoice review, reporting, and e-billing, which contributed to rising legal spend and time-consuming manual processes.

Several common challenges interviewees dealt with prior to Brightflag included:

• Lack of future innovation. Interviewees found that their prior solution lacked innovation and was increasingly not user-friendly. The director of legal and compliance operations at a real estate and technology company said: “The tool I used before Brightflag didn’t feel future-oriented. There were a lot of tasks we still had to do. And I knew with Brightflag and its AI that it felt like the future of managing invoices.” The head of legal operations at a construction supply and distribution organization echoed those sentiments. They shared, “Our prior platform was not putting much thought into their software, whereas Brightflag has a very intentional, modern roadmap.”

• Difficulty enforcing billing guidelines. Interviewees’ legal operations teams said they found the interface of their prior solution “clunky,” which made it a challenge for them to add billing guidelines and ensure that invoices adhered to them. Too often, submissions for expenses fell outside of what they agreed to pay, invoices were in the wrong format, and timekeeper information was missing. However, due to the high volume of invoices submitted, employees did not have the bandwidth to conduct an in-depth review on every invoice. As a result, invoices that might have been rejected instead received signoff and were paid.

• Unsupportive customer service. Each interviewee said they did not receive sufficient support from customer service teams for their legacy ELM solution. They would call their customer service phone number and not receive an answer; meanwhile, emails took three days to receive a response. The head of legal operations at a construction supply and distribution organization said: “The big thing with Brightflag is the high level of customer service you get. Our previous solution would waste time getting us support. I don’t believe there are any competitors with the level of customer service that Brightflag offers.”

• Mounting incremental costs that were avoidable. Increased frequency of signoff on invoices out of compliance with billing guidelines led to interviewees’ organizations overpaying for legal expenses. Further escalating costs were timekeeper rate submissions that were higher than expected and vendors not applying agreed-upon discounts to services.

• Limited bandwidth to review invoices and analyze spend. Interviewees’ approach to invoice reviews and legal spend analysis required significant manual effort and time. The VP and deputy general counsel at a CPG organization said: “We found our inherited tool to be inflexible, and [it was] hard to generate reports or customize to our needs. We’d spend weeks jockeying for customer support to help us build out these functions, and it got increasingly difficult to work with them.”

• Lack of control over legal spend. Interviewees’ inability to gather total visibility over their legal spend made it difficult to gauge if they were over budget on expenses. Legal operations struggled to make informed decisions on how to reallocate their spend and to justify with finance teams the necessity for additional resources.

Solution Requirements

Prior to selecting Brightflag, interviewees searched for a solution that could:

• Integrate data from many different sources, including migration from the previous ELM solution.

• Migrate legacy data with minimal work from internal resources.

• Automate review of invoices, including improved enforcement of billing guidelines.

• Provide exceptional customer service.

Composite Organization

Based on the Composite, Forrester constructed a TEI framework, a composite company, and an ROI analysis that illustrates the areas financially affected. The composite organization is representative of the interviewees’ organizations. Benefits covered in this study are applicable to organizations of different sizes, and the aggregate financial analysis presents their impact on the composite organization in the next section. The composite organization has the following characteristics:

• Description of composite. The composite organization is a global, industry-agnostic company with $4 billion in annual revenue and $10 million in annual legal spend. Prior to adopting Brightflag, the organization had a competitor’s legal operations platform in place for 10 years. However, its legal operations were still manual, and lawyers lacked the bandwidth to thoroughly review invoices and enforce billing guidelines, which led to the organization overpaying for outside legal services.

• Deployment characteristics. Implementation of Brightflag at the composite organization takes 10 weeks, requiring a small amount of time each week from legal operations and finance employees to support Brightflag’s deployment of the solution. Brightflag’s professional services team does almost all the work. Once deployed, the legal operations team at the organization begins enforcing their billing guidelines through Brightflag’s AI auto-flagging and rejection capabilities. Users also become more productive in creating reports to analyze legal spend and collecting insights to identify areas of cost savings.

Analysis Of Benefits

Quantified benefit data as applied to the composite

Improved Billing Compliance

Evidence and data. Interviewees easily input their billing guidelines and agreed billing rates into Brightflag compared to their prior solution, ensuring that vendors submitted invoices in preferred formats (e.g., LEDES or PDFs), including fees and expenses. With Brightflag’s patented, automated AI invoice review, the solution automatically flagged line items that didn’t meet guidelines. In addition, the flags caught any issues that looked like entry errors, including incorrect rates or duplicate charges.

The frequency of these discrepancies became apparent to interviewees as they began using Brightflag. The director of legal and compliance operations at a real estate and technology company noted that the primary reason for adopting and continuing to use Brightflag is its ability to handle invoice review and ensure compliance with guidelines, something their previous solution could not do. This capability was the biggest driver behind both the initial adoption and decision to keep the platform going forward.

Given the time it would take to enforce guidelines in the past, interviewees let these costs slide and paid them. With Brightflag’s auto-reject feature, interviewees gained the ability to stop invoices with out-of-compliance charges from being accepted. This change led to thousands of dollars in cost savings annually for the interviewees.

For the CPG organization, the VP and deputy general counsel said: “Brightflag is a repository of what our arrangements are for billing. They’re flagging what firms haven’t done correctly so that we can discuss how to resolve that with those firms.” The interviewee cited their team as underresourced, but Brightflag and its capabilities have given them the bandwidth to work toward recouping more of these costs.

Modeling and assumptions. For the composite organization, Forrester assumes that the organization has $10 million in annual legal spend. Of that spend, Brightflag helps to flag and/or reject invoices that are out of compliance with billing guidelines. These invoice compliance infractions represent 2% of spend annually that the organization recoups.

Risks. Differences across organizations that may impact this benefit include the following:

• The annual revenue, scale of legal spend, and quality of the previous solution.

• Vendors the organization works with and frequency with which they do not follow billing guidelines.

• The potential cost of each billing guideline infraction.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $448,000.

Savings From Discounts

Evidence and data. Interviewees recognized additional cost savings as Brightflag automatically verified whether outside legal firms correctly applied discounts in their invoices. Their previous legal management solution failed to detect whether discount rates were applied, so their organizations would pay those additional costs without challenging them.

At the construction supply and distribution organization, the head of legal operations ran reports with Brightflag to find discounts that were not applied to invoices. They said: “We had an hourly model with a firm where we’d receive a 10% discount if we hit a certain amount of spend within a year. Brightflag showed us that we weren’t receiving this discount, which we could then show to the firm to ensure they gave it to us.”

Interviewees found that they were often unaware of missing discounts prior to implementing Brightflag. Having evidence from Brightflag of missing discounts, in some cases totaling tens of thousands of dollars, made conversations with firms easy to navigate without pushback.

Modeling and assumptions. For the composite organization, Forrester assumes that it recognizes savings of 1% of legal spend costs based on enforcement of discounts and informed by greater visibility into their spend.

Risks. Differences across organizations that may impact this benefit include the following:

• The annual revenue and scale of legal spend.

• The discounts the organization receives from its vendors.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $224,000.

Avoided Timekeeper Rate Charges

Evidence and data. Brightflag was more thorough than interviewees’ previous solution in its ability to manage timekeeper rates by flagging or auto-rejecting any submissions with unexpected changes in rates, requests from unapproved timekeepers, or missing rate information. Whereas invoices with timekeeper issues had been previously overlooked due to the volume of invoices requiring review, Brightflag made it easy for users to consistently catch these issues.

For the health insurance organization, firms too often submitted timekeeper rates that increased over the course of a year. With Brightflag, it instituted a rule to only allow new timekeeper rates once per year and automatically reject new timekeeper rate submissions thereafter. The legal operations manager at a health insurance organization said: “New timekeeper rates would slip through [with our previous platform], and we wouldn’t notice. It’s easier with Brightflag to set it up to automatically catch and reject when someone would add $50 to $60 per hour to their rate in the middle of a year.”

Modeling and assumptions. For the composite organization, Forrester assumes that the organization avoids 0.75% in timekeeper rate charges that it would have previously paid. Brightflag auto-rejecting charges higher than the agreed-upon rates and having greater visibility over timekeeper rates leads to discussions and agreement to reduce costs.

Risks. Differences across organizations that may impact this benefit include the following:

• The annual revenue and scale of legal spend.

• The frequency with which submitted timekeeper rates vary from expected charges and how much those rates can be rejected or negotiated downward.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $168,000.

More Effective Spend From Greater Visibility Over Budget

Evidence and data. Brightflag’s user-friendly centralized view of legal spend information and reporting on expenditures provided interviewees with greater insights than did their previous system, allowing them to make more informed decisions about their legal budgets. In particular, the ability to see the budgeted total spend in relation to the invoice created significantly greater visibility. The legal operations manager at a health insurance organization said: “It is great when an invoice comes up and we can see our total budget right there. … We are able to track against our anticipated spend and get in front of overspend if it is happening.”

The director of legal and compliance operations at a real estate and technology company recognized the impact of the platform’s flagging on their budgets. They noticed ancillary costs from firms tied to research and travel that were taking up budget, which they had not previously noticed because they were lumped together on invoices. Per their guidelines, they did not have to pay these costs. The interviewee said: “Brightflag saves us money because it highlights invoices that may be out of compliance. Flags are the reason why there’s such a huge ROI with Brightflag. You’re just not going find that in other tools.”

Modeling and assumptions. For the composite organization, Forrester assumes that the organization reduces its legal spend by 1% with insight from Brightflag informing more efficient legal cost control.

Risks. Differences across organizations that may impact this benefit include the following:

• The annual revenue and scale of legal spend.

• The amount of legal spend that is not used effectively and results in unsatisfactory outcomes.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $224,000.

Invoice Review Productivity

Evidence and data. Brightflag helped interviewees to maximize the productivity of employees managing legal invoices and budget reports. At the real estate and technology organization, the legal operations team lacked the ability to automate the invoice review process. Invoice reviews and accruals took the legal team more than half of the work week to manage, but Brightflag’s automated reviews reduced it to a few hours. For lawyers who took the time to review invoices, freeing this bandwidth was a huge value. The director of legal and compliance operations said: “Brightflag is saving our attorneys — those who did review invoices — between an hour and 5 hours a week. They know our guidelines and would scrutinize invoices heavily. But Brightflag’s automated flagging is relieving that work from them.”

The head of legal operations at a construction supply and distribution company echoed these sentiments, sharing that prior to Brightflag, they had spent upward of a half hour reviewing each invoice, but now it took no longer than 3 minutes. They added: “[With Brightflag], it’s simple to look at the flags and see anything that needs to be resolved. Or if there’s no flag, I can click Approve, and that’s zero time spent reviewing an invoice that is in compliance.”

Modeling and assumptions. For the composite organization, Forrester assumes the following:

• On an annual basis, 1,900 invoices are submitted to the organization.

• Without a solution like Brightflag, invoices take 30 minutes to review. With Brightflag, time spent reviewing invoices is reduced by 70%.

• The fully burdened hourly rate for internal lawyer FTEs who support invoice reviews is $100. This assumption is based on US Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates and considerations for additional benefits (e.g., paid time off, retirement, etc.).

• The equivalent of one full-time legal operations employee allocates one workday each week to accruals. In the first year, time spent on this work is reduced by 50%.

• The equivalent of two legal operations employees spend one workday per week creating reports and dashboards. They increase their productivity on this work by 50%.

• The assumed fully burdened hourly rate for legal operations employees is $50.

• A recapture rate is applied to all of the productivity benefits. The TEI methodology incorporates the assumption that a group of employees who experience a productivity benefit will dedicate unlocked productivity to additional work and a portion to nonwork. For these productivity benefits, three-quarters of the productivity will go toward additional work and one-quarter will go toward employees having longer breaks and not attempting to take on invoice work with spare time, qualitatively making for improved employee experience.

Risks. Differences across organizations that may impact this benefit include the following:

• The annual number of invoices received, capabilities of the legacy ELM solution, and time spent to review the invoices.

• The size of the team responsible for accruals and reports, as well as time spent on the work.

• The fully burdened hourly rate for employees involved with labor.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $181,000.

Unquantified Benefits

Interviewees mentioned the following additional benefits that their organizations experienced but were not able to quantify:

• Highly supportive and responsive customer success team. Interviewees spoke highly of Brightflag’s support for operations with the platform. The VP and deputy general counsel at a CPG organization said, “I now expect all other technology vendors we work with to offer customer service like Brightflag. They are top-notch — my new standard for customer service.” By contrast, interviewees reported that their legal operations teams had experienced response times of between three and five days to resolve an issue with their previous solution.

• Quick and straightforward migration process. Deployment of Brightflag at interviewees’ organizations was completed faster than what had been projected by competing solution providers. Brightflag further proved itself as a trusted partner by cleanly transferring years of data from interviewees’ previous solutions. The head of legal operations at a construction supply and distribution organization said: “I had a large amount of data that needed to be transferred correctly. Brightflag was able to transfer everything accurately and quicker than expected.”

Flexibility

The value of flexibility is unique to each customer. There are scenarios in which a customer might implement Brightflag and later realize additional uses and business opportunities, including:

• Taking advantage of the Ask Brightflag feature, built on Brightflag’s AI foundation, to streamline operations. Interviewees were still in the early stages of leveraging Brightflag’s genAI assistant Ask Brightflag, but they had found it useful when called upon. The head of legal operations at a construction supply and distribution organization said: “Ask Brightflag is a new feature, and it’s really good at answering questions like, ‘How much did I spend in this matter?’ It’s getting better every day. and I use it a good amount.” The VP and deputy general counsel at a CPG organization planned to use the feature more in the future: “It’s going to eventually help us more because part of our challenge is how we’re structured with different groupings. If it can help us manage oversight in finding information so we’re not having to ask people individually, then that can only be beneficial.”

Flexibility would also be quantified when evaluated as part of a specific project (described in more detail in Total Economic Impact Approach).