Lucky 7: Smart Ways to Take Control of Legal Spend
Legal teams are under pressure. The work keeps piling up, but the budget rarely grows with it. Expectations are rising, and the old ways of working such as adding more headcount or increasing hours are not always an option.
If your team is feeling the squeeze, this list is for you. These seven practical tips are based on what works. They are being used by leading legal teams to control costs, keep up with demand, and stay focused on high-value work. Whether you’re looking to free up capacity, streamline delivery, or make better use of tech, there’s something here to help you act now.
1. Prioritise and Triage Legal Work
Not all work carries the same risk or value. Take a step back and assess where your team’s time is going. Focus your in-house lawyers on high-risk or business-critical matters, and create a strategy to outsource routine, repeatable, or process-heavy tasks. Or, if your internal team is strong on day-to-day work, consider outsourcing specialised or strategic projects where additional expertise is needed.
2. Tap Into Fractional and Flexible Legal Talent
Relying solely on permanent hires can limit your ability to adapt. By bringing in experienced legal professionals on a fractional or interim basis, you gain targeted expertise exactly when and where it's needed, without long-term overheads. Whether it’s covering a senior role, managing a surge in demand, or supporting a specialist project, flexible legal talent enables you to stay responsive and deliver consistent results with greater cost control.
3. Re-evaluate How High-Volume Legal Work Is Delivered
Many large corporates with high-volume commercial contract work are turning to managed services to increase efficiency. While this model remains popular, expectations have shifted. Cost savings are still important, but teams are now looking for partners that can offer scale, quality, and real integration with the business.
Look for delivery models that give you more control, better visibility, and the ability to support global needs. This often involves rethinking existing arrangements, challenging legacy assumptions, and exploring hybrid models that combine onshore quality with offshore efficiency.
4. Review Your Workflows for Efficiency and Waste
Budget pressure often brings hidden inefficiencies to the surface. Step back and evaluate how work flows through your team, from intake and triage to delivery.
Ask where effort is being duplicated, where tasks could be automated or reassigned, and which steps no longer add value. Partnering with an experienced consultant can help you redesign workflows to reduce cost and improve speed without sacrificing quality.
5. Build KPIs That Show the Real Value of Legal
With legal budgets under greater scrutiny, anecdotal wins won’t cut it. It’s time to move away from the storytelling and towards measurable outcomes.
Do the hard work to create KPIs that look backwards to measure yourself against what you are doing today. Focus on metrics that clearly communicate business impact—turnaround times, cost per matter, internal client satisfaction—and use them to inform decisions and secure executive buy-in.
6. Strengthen Your Partnerships With Finance and Procurement
To stay ahead of budget pressure, legal teams need to be tightly aligned with finance and procurement. These partnerships help you secure better terms with external providers, plan spend more effectively, and position legal as a proactive business partner. Don’t just check in at budget time, build regular touchpoints that connect legal priorities to wider commercial goals. When legal is seen as part of the broader business strategy, it’s easier to protect investment and demonstrate value.
7. Embrace Legal Technology—But Use It Strategically
LegalTech remains one of the most powerful levers for reducing cost and increasing efficiency, but the key is to apply it deliberately.
Start by making sure your existing tools are being used to their full potential. Review adoption rates, user training, and whether you’re leveraging key features. Then look at where automation or AI can relieve pressure: contract lifecycle tools, e-billing systems, document automation, and legal research platforms can reduce manual work and create room for higher-value tasks.
Conclusion
Legal teams are finding new ways to stretch their resources while staying focused on what matters most.
This is an opportunity to rethink how legal work gets done. These seven strategies, when applied with intent, can help you stay in control, protect quality, and focus your team where it delivers the greatest impact. Start with one. Build from there.