Brightflag, the AI-powered legal spend management and matter management platform, announces new reporting features that provide corporate legal departments with a simple, standardized solution for evaluating the qualitative performance of outside counsel. When combined with existing reports on quantitative metrics like blended hourly rate, this additional context offers in-house legal teams a more nuanced perspective when assessing the value and deciding the future direction of a law firm relationship.
According to the Association of Corporate Counsel’s 2020 Legal Operations Maturity
Benchmarking Report, 40% of corporate legal departments classify the maturity of their external resource management strategy as “early stage.” Fewer than 10% have integrated the
associated metrics into a dashboard report made accessible to their general counsel.
“With outside counsel spend often accounting for more than half of their departmental budget, in-house legal teams must be able to measure the value of each law firm relationship and articulate it in ways the rest of the organization can understand,” said Brightflag CEO and
co-founder Ian Nolan. “By enabling customers to capture qualitative nuances in objective
reports, we’re making it easier than ever to conduct holistic performance evaluations and
identify top business partners.”
For each matter managed on the Brightflag platform, designated matter leads can now rate the
associated vendor(s) across five qualitative criteria: Communication, quality of advice, business alignment, budget adherence, and overall recommendation. Ratings are then instantly added to dashboard reports, where legal department leaders can compare vendors across one or more metrics as they weigh critical resourcing decisions.