| Executive Summary: After automating invoice reviews, an organization should reinvest freed capacity improve both operations and alignment to business needs. Opportunities include redeployment for strategic vendor management, Alternative Fee Arrangements (AFAs), strategic contract negotiation, and other strategies that may improve both the business and the practice of law. Reinvestment also helps to prevent unchecked rate inflation and offers meaningful talent development. |
This is Part 4 of our 5-part series “Stop the Leak: A Guide to Mastering Legal Spend.”
In the first three parts of this series, we moved from unpacking the challenges of manual invoice reviews to implementing AI, not only to automate reviews more accurately, but to establish a powerful intelligence engine for legal spend data analysis. We’ve stopped the leak, but it is not the end of the journey. It’s the beginning.
You have just reclaimed thousands of hours of high-value professional time. The question is what to do with it.
The answer is not to simply bank the savings. Full benefit realization comes when you reinvest that freed capacity into strategic functions that were previously neglected. In this article, we reallocate your team along two distinct but parallel tracks:
(1) The Operations Track, focused on the business of law.
(2) The Legal Track, focused on higher-value legal work.
But first, we start by addressing the most important factor: your people.
Managing the Change
The resources we’re talking about reallocating are not faceless employees. They are skilled professionals, paralegals, dedicated contract administrators, and possibly in-house counsel. For them, the transformation to AI automation is a process change as well as a potential shift in professional identity.
Before you decide where to reallocate time and tasks, consider how to guide people through the steps of personal change.
One human-centric framework for this is Prosci’s ADKAR™ model, which is a widely adopted approach for managing individual change. The model was first developed in 1996 after studying change patterns in more than 700 organizations and later refined with benchmarking across 1,100 companies across 59 countries. ADKAR outlines the sequence an individual must traverse to adopt change successfully. It is a practical tool for any leader managing the impacts of AI-driven transformation.
How to apply the ADKAR model:
1. A – Awareness
Communicate the need for the change. This is your opportunity to frame the narrative. Host a team session that focuses on the strategic challenges from Part 1 of this series. Share data on billing leakage and time spent on manual work. Frame the problem as systemic rather than personal. The message is not, “You are being replaced,” but rather, “The manual process is broken, and it’s preventing you from doing higher-value work.”
2. D – Desire
Once the team understands the problem, build personal desire to participate in the change. Answer, “what’s in it for me” and present new opportunities as a career development path. Demonstrate how the tactical work of invoice review can evolve into strategic opportunities. Frame the change as a positive challenge and an opportunity to develop valuable, in-demand skills.
3. K – Knowledge
Provide the knowledge required for new tasks or roles. Demonstrate real investment in the team. Organize workshops on supervising AI, negotiation tactics, and designing automation workflows. This keeps the focus on people, not only on the technology.
4. A – Ability
Knowledge alone does not create skill. Give the team structured opportunities to apply what they have learned in a supported environment. Create a transition phase with micro-tasks. For example, analyze spend for one firm or build a simple NDA playbook. This safe practice builds confidence and turns knowledge into demonstrated ability.
5. Reinforcement
Make the change part of the culture. Celebrate wins when the GC uses newly accessible insight or when a new playbook shortens contract cycle times. Simple, visible recognition reinforces the value of change.
By following a human-centric framework like ADKAR, you channel real concerns into a compelling talent development initiative. You will retain the people you wish to redeploy and enlist them as full participants in growing the strategic value of your team. With the team now fully on board, you can provide them with a clear roadmap for where to focus their freed time.
Redeployment: A Two Track Strategy
The optimal approach for redeployment is to divide freed capacity into two distinct tracks, leveraging the unique skills of: 1) your operations professionals and 2) your attorneys. The suggestions below also align with and support growth across the CLOC Core 12 framework, a capability maturity model for Legal Operations.
Track One: Rearchitecting the Business of Law
This track focuses on the roles of paralegals, administrators, and legal operations personnel freed from manual invoice review. These professionals typically possess a deep understanding of legal workflows and financial processes, making them well positioned to move from process users to process owners.
Three top opportunities to rearchitect the Business of Law include:
1. Vendor Performance
Who: Detail-oriented paralegal or legal ops specialist.
CLOC Core 12: Firm and Vendor Management and Business Intelligence
Jobs To Be Done: Improve vendor relationship management to optimize value for every dollar spent on outside counsel.
- Benchmarking: Use directories and market data to benchmark law firm rates. Provide the data needed to push back on unjustified increases and ensure fair pricing.
- Scorecarding: Develop and manage data-driven scorecards for your organization’s top firms, tracking responsiveness, adherence to billing-guidelines and budgets, diversity, and outcomes. See: “A Practical Guide to Scorecarding for Legal Ops”.
- Data-Driven QBRs: Prepare and lead Quarterly Business Reviews with law firms. Shift the conversation from a relationship check-ins to strategic discussions grounded in data.
2. Value and Pricing
Who: Finance professional, financially-minded legal ops specialist, senior paralegal with an aptitude for analytics.
CLOC Core 12: Financial Management and Service Delivery Models.
Jobs To Be Done: Redesign financial dashboards to shape or influence the cost of legal work before it begins.
- Improving Value : Using vendor performance data, work with firms to move beyond the billable hour and adopt smart AFAs.
- Building a Price Library: Analyze historical matters to create a library of pre-approved AFA constructs. This promotes predictability for common, repeatable matter types. When a new matter comes in, the team has a strong data set for value-based negotiation.
- Assumption & Scoping: Create assumption sheets that define scope, identify out-of-scope triggers, and set change order rules. These assets prevent scope creep and improve predictability.
3. Delivery & Automation
Who: Process-minded contract administrators or tech-savvy legal ops professionals.
CLOC Core 12: Knowledge Management, Service Delivery Models and Technology.
Jobs To Be Done: Become the architect of the legal department’s operating system. Make legal services easy to access, consistent to deliver, and more efficient.
- Building Legal Playbooks & Clause Libraries: This is a mission-critical, often neglected function, that is easily assisted by AI. Work with attorneys to create detailed playbooks for high-volume agreements such as NDAs, MSAs, DPAs, SOWs. Document standard and fallback positions, memorialize negotiation guidance, and maintain the central clause library that powers both human and AI-driven contract preparation, review and extraction. A well-maintained library is the single most important asset for scaling legal expertise in contracting.
- Improving Legal Workflows: Map key processes with enterprise-ready, AI-enabled tools. Design, build, and continuously improve workflows for legal intake, matter setup, and related processes.
- Finding the Next Automation Opportunities: Use interactions with AI chat and dashboards to spot repeatable patterns, then streamline them. Update Outside Counsel Billing Guidelines as AI reaches the accuracy required to take on tasks currently performed by costly outside counsel.
Track Two: Lifting the Practice of Law
This track focuses on in-house counsel, especially junior lawyers. By offloading low-value invoice review and other administrative work through Track One, you enable lawyers to focus on high-judgment legal work that mitigates risk and drives business strategy.
1. Amplify Legal Value
Who: Junior or mid-level in-house counsel.
CLOC Core 12: Facilitates Financial Management and Practice Operations.
Jobs To Be Done: Invest freed time at the front end of the deal cycle, where it creates the most value.
- Contract Negotiation: Spend more time securing favorable terms in critical sales and procurement agreements. Research from Harvard Business School and Boston Consulting Group shows that professionals in the lower half of a knowledge organization can outperform those in the upper half when equipped with AI and data.
- Embed yourself within the Business: Fulfill the promise of business partnership by working alongside sales, product, and HR to align legal strategy with business objectives, rather than becoming a hurdle at the end of a process.
2. Proactive Risk & Dispute Management
Who: Litigation counsel or commercially minded attorneys.
CLOC Core 12: Strategic Planning and Practice Operations.
Jobs To Be Done: Shift from reacting to problems to proactively preventing them.
- Early Case Assessment: Instead of firefighting, dedicate the time needed for Early Case Assessments (ECAs), using historical data to make smarter, data-driven decisions about whether to settle or litigate a dispute.
- Policy Development: Lead proactive policy initiatives around risks like AI governance, data privacy, and ESG, crafting the guidelines that will protect the company in the future.
- Alternative Dispute Resolution: Explore and execute the mediation or arbitration strategies with the aim to save the organization more than traditional litigation.
The jobs to be done across Track One and Track Two represent a roadmap for reinvesting your team’s time. However, the time you reclaim is not a permanent gain; it is a temporary advantage.
The Final Challenge: Consolidate Your Gains
The time you have reclaimed through automation is not a permanent gain. It is an advantage. You brace against two powerful headwinds: rate inflation and value leakage. You must continuously apply your team’s newly freed capacity towards the tasks above or risk losing ground.
- Upward Pricing Pressure: The legal market is in a period of aggressive rate hikes. According to Thompson Reuters, during the first quarter of 2025, law firms increased their worked rates by 7.3% compared to Q1 2024. This continues a steady trend of quarter-over-quarter, year-over-year increases. To control this price dynamic corporate legal departments must fundamentally change to how they source, scope, and price legal work. Track One and Track Two provide that framework.
- Ongoing Contract Value Leakage: Once a contract is signed, its value can erode. World Commerce & Contracting’s 2023 benchmark (a partnership between Accenture and the Commerce & Contract Management Institute) shows that the average contract loses 8.6% of its value due to missed obligations, unmanaged scope changes, and weak performance management. Without active, post-award governance, the value you fight for in negotiations can be lost during execution. Again, by freeing time across the legal team, and by embracing AI-enabled approaches and contract agents, your organization can protect hard-earned contract value.
In short, the pressure to demonstrate value is constant. There is little rationale for assigning high-cost experts to low-value tasks that AI can handle. Strategic leverage comes from vendor management, value pricing, and proactive risk and dispute management. Historically, legal teams struggled to make time for these disciplines. Now they can.
The Gist of It
You have stopped the leak by automating invoice reviews and operationalizing your OCBGs. Now reinvest that reclaimed time before market forces such as rate inflation (about 7 percent) and contract value erosion (8.6 percent) reclaim it. Redeploy talent along two tracks: an Operations track focused on panel performance, pricing, and service design, and a Legal track focused on contract value realization and early dispute resolution. This two-track model compounds your initial savings and turns a simple efficiency gain into lasting strategic transformation.
Coming up in Part 5: We’ll bring it all together by stepping through the logic of building a solid ROI model for AI, quantifying the potential savings and providing a clear framework for considering investment in your legal department’s transformation.
