Cost Savings From Reduced Or Avoided Outside Counsel Spend

Evidence and data. The interviewees indicated that a significant objective of implementing genAI solutions within their departments was to reduce spending with outside counsel. They said that using Lexis+ AI increased their department’s capacity to take on more matters internally, particularly transactional matters or support for legal inquiries. However, interviewees agreed they must exercise caution when considering which matters are appropriate to bring in-house versus those that should continue to go to external legal resources, such as complex litigation matters. They cited risk-mitigation concerns as well as the resource structure of their departments as primary factors when looking to increase the volume of matters handled internally.

• The AVP of staff counsel operations at an insurance organization said their department reduced cycle times with Lexis+ AI and that attorneys eliminated the friction associated with starting certain tasks, which improved their ability to file motions sooner. The interviewee said: “A mantra as an attorney is, ‘What can I do to keep this ball rolling?’ You don’t want stasis. You don’t want a time period on a file when nothing is being done.  And so, the sooner we can strike to get those motions filed — assuming we’ve got everything we need to get it prepared — the sooner we’re going to reach a conclusion. [That] will reduce our cycle time.”

• The same interviewee associated a reduction in cycle times within the department to the ability to further increase capacity: “That is really where Lexis+ AI comes into play since we want the attorneys to do licensed work, and we want them to do it efficiently. [With Lexis+ AI,] we have increased our average attorney caseload from approximately 53 files per attorney to 56 files per attorney [per year].”

• The same interviewee said the saved time for attorneys translated into cost savings on outside counsel spend. They stated: “The assumption is that any case that goes to [outside] counsel is going to be more expensive by virtue of a higher billable rate, but then also by virtue of the fact that the cycle time will likely be longer and more work is going to be put into that file. The incentive for [an outside] counsel attorney is the more they bill, the more money they make. But as staff counsel, we are salaried employees, and we do not have that same incentive to bill up the file.”

• Regarding the type of work or matters that are appropriate to bring in-house, the VP of legal operations at a real estate firm cited extraneous legal questions and stated that even if a single question was resolved with Lexis+ AI versus going to outside counsel, the investment would pay for itself: “Every question we ask Lexis+ AI would have otherwise gone to outside counsel. In almost all cases, [attorneys] would have gone to outside counsel to confirm whatever they were able to find on [Lexis+ AI]. So, you can easily look at what [the solution] costs you per license, and you can look at what it would have cost you for even just an hour of outside counsel time. That math is easy. I look at my 20 users and I can monetize their salaries. I can monetize outside counsel’s hourly rate, and I think it’s a no-brainer as long as [employees] are using it. If you do one or two tasks [with Lexis+ AI], it might [pay] for your whole year [of Lexis+ AI access]."

• The North America privacy counsel at an environmental organization saw the value in reducing back-and-forth email correspondence with outside counsel or avoiding it altogether depending on the legal question at hand. They said, “[If my organization’s attorneys] get to understanding faster with internal counsel alone or even with fewer back and forth emails with outside counsel — which are billed — then we are saving on fees.”

• The senior legal operations manager of legal and compliance at an insurance organization explained that their organization sought outside counsel to mitigate or transfer some of the risk associated with decision-making or application of the legal finding. Regardless, the same interviewee said they view Lexis+ AI as a means for their organization’s attorneys to obtain more specific answers to more complex and obscure matters. They said, “I am working with the assumption that those obscure matters are matters that would have automatically been sent to outside counsel [before using Lexis+ AI].” The same interviewee estimated their department spent $800,000 on outside counsel for legal or research questions alone last year, which they said presents ample opportunity for cost savings by bringing more obscure legal questions in-house.

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• Before using Lexis+ AI, the composite organization handled 7,750 total matters annually, and internal resources handled 47% of those matters. As such, each attorney handled about 53 matters per year.

• The composite organization uses outside counsel for litigation case matters, transactional matters or deals, and support on legal issues that may impact the business.

• The matters brought in-house with Lexis+ AI represent legal questions that previously went to outside counsel due to a lack of internal bandwidth or prolonged communication with outside counsel regarding a legal question that was not fully formed or understood. As such, the composite organization previously billed for each of these matters to the lowest integer for external law firms at 1 hour. 

• The composite organization almost exclusively works with large law firms as external counsel resources, and the billable rates range from $670 in Year 1 to $811 in Year 3 to reflect annual market adjustments of 10%. Most matters sent to outside counsel regarding legal questions go to junior associates, but every third matter goes to a senior associate or partner-level associate.

Risks. Cost savings from avoided outside counsel spend may vary depending on the following:

• The volume of matters handled annually by the organization as well as the ratio of work handled by internal resources and outside counsel.

• The appetite for the organization to bring more matters in-house, which depends on the type of attorneys on staff and the level of risk or compliance controls in place.

• The types of legal matters the organization typically handles, which can inform the ability to bring work in-house and the associated savings. For example, in some cases, litigation matters are less likely to be handled in-house than transactional or legal inquiry matters.

• The avoided cost of outside counsel, which will depend on the average billable rate for matters handled by outside counsel and the hourly rate of the internal attorney.

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 $602,000.

Increased Attorney Capacity Efficiencies In Addressing Legal Inquiries

Evidence and data. Interviewees noted that their organizations’ attorneys can produce top-quality and effective responses to legal inquiries without the help of genAI solutions, but they recognized that performing many of the tasks associated with addressing legal inquiries (e.g., conducting research, summarizing and communicating the findings) was not the highest-value use of attorney time. But they said with Lexis+ AI, their attorneys more quickly arrive at quality findings or outcomes. They also said their organizations rely on Lexis+ AI to generate first drafts of research summaries and client communications (e.g., memos). As such, they explained that attorneys better meet internal customer expectations for turnaround times and that Lexis+ AI increased their capacity to take on more work for the department.

• The senior legal operations manager of legal and compliance at an insurance organization said they view Lexis+ AI as a useful tool for addressing legal inquiries: “Attorneys are getting to an answer more quickly than they did in the previous world. Even if they must go back and double-check information, they are still getting to the answer faster.”

• The same interviewee elaborated on the size and complexity of many legal inquiries for attorneys. They said: “[An attorney] may want to search for a particular legal question or subject, and they may run across 300 cases they have to filter down and try to pinpoint for relevancy. But [with Lexis+ AI], they can ask a very specific question and drill down to a handful of cases for review. So, the time that it would take for you to search through 300 cases — just trying to get to a couple that are relevant to your question — is a big, big time saver.”

• The AVP of staff counsel operations at a different insurance organization described the value of accelerating time to start for attorneys when it came to legal inquiries. They indicated that Lexis+ AI eliminated barriers to starting research, which cut in half the total project timelines of 7 hours. Furthermore, the interviewee said that by accelerating the timelines for legal inquiry responses, their organization impacted broader case cycle length by minimizing the expected effort associated with the task. They explained: “It really comes down to the basic summary judgment motion that’s been sitting on the corner of that attorney’s desk for three months. They do not have 7 hours to block to get to prepare a brief and do the research that is required. We felt that the Lexis+ AI tool was fundamental in shortening that time span, allowing someone to think, ‘Yeah, I have time to do this today.’ So, it helps with limiting procrastination by shortening the hill they need to climb to get to the point of actually filing that particular document.”

• The North America privacy counsel at an environmental organization estimated that 20% of their workload became easier with Lexis+ AI. They specifically identified research workflows as those most impacted by the tool. They said: “I am no longer exhausting so much energy into thinking and writing. It’s more about, ‘Here is a sentence. Now give me a five-page draft on the topic.’” The interviewee said that with the time back, they became able to respond to more customer requests or speak with officials to further improve the quality of findings.

• Regarding quality, the same interviewee described the importance of accelerating time to an answer for many attorneys. They said they see Lexis+ AI as a tool to help identify a needle in a haystack or to get to the “a-ha” moment sooner: “All lawyers are looking for the smoking gun. To get there, you must pinpoint issues in a way that you may have previously overlooked if you did your old way of searching. The good thing about [Lexis+ AI] is that it is native language, so you interact with it as if you are just talking to it.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• The composite organization doles out access to Lexis+ AI at a controlled cadence over the three-year investment period, granting access to 40% of the attorneys with high utilization of the tool in Year 1. It increases attorney access to 60% in Year 2 and to 80% in Year 3.

• Of the attorney time, 20% is spent on tasks that impacted by the Lexis+ AI tool, specifically within addressing legal inquiry and research workflows.

• The average fully burdened hourly rate for an impacted attorney is $120. 

• Attorneys redirect 50% of the time savings to value-added work.

Risks. Increased attorney capacity from efficiencies in addressing legal inquiries may vary depending on the following:

• The size of the organization’s legal department and the level of access granted to attorneys.

• The size, location, and industry of the organization.

• The organization’s approach to addressing legal inquiry and research prior to adopting Lexis+ AI, including any solutions in place.

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 $574,000.

Paralegal Efficiencies

Evidence and data. Interviewees said paralegals are an important and heavily burdened resource within corporate legal departments and that Lexis+ AI assisted them with many time-consuming and rote tasks that fell into the bucket of administrative work (e.g., summarizing and analyzing documents in preparation for attorney handling). Paralegals redirected the time savings to further support the increased capacity within the legal department to improve the quality of work product and take on more matters in-house.  

• The VP of legal operations at a real estate organization indicated that paralegals spend 20% to 30% of their time summarizing documents but that with Lexis+ AI, summarizing tasks that previously took 2 to 3 hours to complete now takes half that time. They said paralegals shifted from manually summarizing large volumes of documents to allowing Lexis+ AI to generate the summaries and simply review the results and that the time savings are critical not only to increasing paralegal capacity, but also to provide these busy resources more time to focus on quality assurance, giving them the freedom to apply more creative thinking to their work. The VP said: “When you don’t have to spend so much time summarizing the documents, you are freed up to spend time on other parts of the deal. You might catch something, or you might think about something that you wouldn’t have had the bandwidth to do if you were bogged down manually summarizing things.”

• The North America privacy counsel at an environmental organization said they see the value of Lexis+ AI in supporting paralegals in their document analysis responsibilities. They explained that paralegals are the first point of contact internally for most documents, so they are often responsible for manually dissecting documents (e.g., contracts) and organizing them by topic or content type to then distribute to an attorney or resource for review. The interviewee said Lexis+ AI is a valuable tool for breaking down documents to facilitate easier digestion by their various legal experts: “Some of the contracts that we see can be 500 to 600 pages long. It can take our paralegals a long time to manually break out the contract in a way that is easy to digest for our legal experts.” The interviewee also indicated that their organization’s paralegals save 50% of the time spent on document analysis responsibilities with Lexis+ AI.

• The North America privacy counsel at an environmental organization also connected the paralegal time savings to better quality outputs. They said: “If we have a structured way of organizing a contract and we get a question about the content of that contract, a paralegal can easily identify where to find the answer. And, if it’s blank, we know that [content] is missing. And what I mean by ‘missing’ is that it wasn’t negotiated and is excluded from the contract in its current state.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• The composite organization provides access to Lexis+ AI to an increasing number of paralegals over the three-year investment period. It gives access to 10% in Year 1, 20% in Year 2, and 30% in Year 3.

• The composite organization’s paralegals spend 25% of their time on administrative tasks (e.g., summarizing documents and preparing them for legal work).

• With Lexis+ AI, the composite organization’s paralegals save 50% of the time they previously spent manually summarizing and preparing documents for attorney work.

• Because the composite organization’s paralegals are busy resources and have large backlogs of responsibilities, they redistribute 80% of the time savings enabled by Lexis+ AI to value-added work for the department. 

• The average fully burdened hourly rate for a paralegal is $56.

Risks. Paralegal efficiencies may vary depending on the following:

• The Lexis+ AI access the organization provides to paralegal resources.

• The number of paralegal resources within the department.

• The average time spent on administrative tasks prior to adoption of Lexis+ AI and the organization’s ability to automate more of those tasks.

• The organization’s size, location, and industry.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 5%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $53,000.

Unquantified Benefits

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

• Improving employee experience and facilitating career growth opportunities. The interviewees agreed that having genAI solutions in place to support legal staff felt like a necessary part of providing their organizations’ employees with the right tools to do their jobs effectively. The VP of legal operations in real estate said, “[I assume having Lexis+ AI] would make the employee experience better because a lot of [employee] experience is about having the right tools to do the job, whether you’re a chef or in the legal arena.” To highlight another avenue for improving employee experience, the North America privacy counsel at an environmental organization said they view Lexis+ AI as a time-saving tool that enables attorneys to end their workdays or workweeks sooner, thereby striking a better work-life balance.
  
  Additionally, many of the interviewees said Lexis+ AI presents more opportunities to impact career growth for both current employees and new talent (e.g., through cross-training opportunities or by upskilling new or junior attorneys more quickly). The AVP of staff counsel operations at an insurance organization assumes that faster upskilling or onboarding of attorneys will further impact organizational capacity. They said: “If I bring on a new attorney, I want them to have Lexis+ at a minimum, but then to also consider Lexis+ AI. The assumption is that [Lexis+ AI] is going to allow those individuals to be more efficient in their work, and that it’s going to allow them to get up to a full caseload faster.”

• Accelerating time to better quality outputs. Interviewees said Lexis+ AI improves output quality and accelerates time to value. They expect there will be additional value in providing access to Lexis+ AI to a wider range of employees to broaden the impact of the higher-quality work. With Lexis+ AI, junior associates or paralegals got to preliminary answers or started preliminary drafts with more success than if they used solutions without AI. Additionally, the senior legal operations manager of legal and compliance at an insurance organization said they see a strong user base for Lexis+ AI in younger attorneys with less than 10 years of experience. Interviewees said that as more junior and supporting staff utilize Lexis+ AI, more resources and complete workflows will benefit from the associated efficiencies and quality outcomes.

• Achieving AI adoption goals in an accurate, safe way. Interviewees explained their organizations are under pressure to leverage automation and AI to provide operational efficiencies across all departments and functions. However, they said corporate legal departments — unlike other departments — have unique requirements regarding proprietary and privileged information as well as the quality of the underlying data and sources and that this adds complexity that other departments may not experience. Interviewees said Lexis+ AI meets both enterprisewide information security and privacy requirements while also meeting the unique needs of legal departments with commercial-grade private cloud infrastructure, independently trained models with siloed user sessions, customer data encryption, and help meeting regulations like the EU’s AI processing center regulations.
  
  Interviewees said that as a result, Lexis+ AI enables their companies’ corporate legal departments to meet organizationwide directives to adopt genAI. The senior legal operations manager of legal and compliance at an insurance organization stated: “We have a directive to better leverage automation and technology. Within that directive, the company as a whole is working to enhance its AI capabilities. My department is conservative when it comes to adopting technology. There was no appetite to do a big research project across all available AI tools and start a bunch of pilot programs. Instead, we are looking at existing tools that offer genAI and we are starting with Lexis+ AI, which I think has been a promising start.”

Flexibility

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

• Expanding applications and use cases. Many interviewees said their organization is in the early days of Lexis+ AI adoption but that they are already thinking about future applications and use cases. Interviewees anticipate future impacts for their organizations by providing more access to more attorneys at different levels and by identifying more applications for the evolving Lexis+ AI functionality.
  
  For example, the senior legal operations manager of legal and compliance in the insurance industry indicated their organization viewed paralegals as a large potential user group of Lexis+ AI because they are often responsible for the type of perfunctory tasks that can be completed more efficiently with Lexis+ AI. The manager said time savings in administrative workflows increased paralegal capacity to take on similar work in-house versus having to send it to outside counsel due to restricted capacity. They said, “We see [Lexis+ AI] as an opportunity to have paralegals do some of the rote work that we must outsource currently, such as the 50-state surveys that we are responsible for.”
  
  Additionally, the North America privacy counsel at an environmental organization said they expect the summarize capabilities of Lexis+ AI to improve, which they believe would make the tool more applicable for larger, more complex document summaries. And the VP of legal operations at a real estate organization said change in behavior or internal process improvements are additional drivers to expand use cases or applications of Lexis+ AI. For example, they said that as their organization uses Lexis+ AI to draft more common document types, it will be able to templatize more of those drafts to further accelerate time to completion.

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