Non-compliant legal spend quietly drains 6–12% of annual legal fees. This means a $200M legal budget could be leaking $24M a year, money that could be funding other priorities or even used to fix the underlying problems: ineffective reviews, weak guidelines, and fragmented data.

Why AI Belongs in the Conversation

One study published in April 2025, compared Large Language Models (LLMs) to legal professionals, and found LLMs 20% more accurate and nearly 100x faster when reviewing invoice compliance.

With billing rates now increasing by more than 7%, the most aggressive rate hike since 2005, it’s time to unpack this problem. Let’s explore actions any Legal Ops can take to improve the situation and look at the potential for AI to make a difference.

We’re launching a five-part series to examine what contributes to legal overspend and how AI can become a strategic lever to stop this leak, once and for all:

What’s Ahead in this Series:

Part 1: The Hidden Costs of Manual Invoice Review

A deep dive into the operational realities and human factors that make this review process ineffective. 

Part 2: The Role of Outside Counsel Billing Guidelines (OCBGs)

Why these guidelines form the foundation for effective invoice reviews, and the challenges around them. We’ll also explore how AI can enable and enforce stronger OCBGs.

Part 3: Forecasting and Reporting

How to forecast spend and leverage AI for more accurate reporting, and to extract intelligence and deliver insights.

Part 4: Redefining Legal Ops Roles

If professionals no longer need to review invoices manually, where should their time go? We’ll consider five functions to reallocate the time of these essential knowledge workers.

Part 5: Building the ROI Case for AI

We’ll walk through the logic of building an ROI model for AI. Using a detailed example, we’ll show how to quantify potential savings and provide a framework for considering investment in AI.