Why Legal Spend Transparency Is a 2026 GC Imperative
Meena Sandhu
Head of Managed Services
Iota Analytics
If you are a General Counsel, this situation will sound familiar.
A litigation matter approved with a budget of $150,000 quietly grows to $280,000.
The in-house team only realizes this once the final invoice arrives.
Questions start coming in from finance and leadership.
Outside counsel invoices arrive with broad descriptions such as “legal research” or “case strategy.”
Meanwhile, the GC is swamped with:
Over 40 active matters across multiple law firms, with no real-time visibility into budget status.
Overlapping billing by multiple law firms on the same issue or case, due to a lack of visibility across matters.
These are not isolated occurrences. They point to a system in which legal spend is fragmented, reactive, and difficult to manage.
This lack of clarity is not what a GC would want.
Across corporate legal departments in the UK and the US, legal spend overruns are becoming routine. Legal spend transparency is shifting from a “nice to have” to a non-negotiable. As we move forward in 2026, it is increasingly a leadership concern, not merely an operational one.
Where litigation budgets really go off track - This is the “Real Cost of Opacity”
Cost overruns in litigation tend to follow familiar patterns.
Discovery phases scoped at 200 hours extend well beyond initial estimates.
Matters expected to conclude within six months run on for a year or more.
Duplicate effort, scope creep, and missed checkpoints incrementally inflate costs.
Matters are assigned legal leads, but without a clearly accountable budget owner.
Budgets are approved before scope exclusions are properly documented.
Spend reviews take place monthly or quarterly, despite cost risk peaking at specific stages such as pleadings, close of discovery, or pre-trial.
At its core, this is driven by a lack of data at the right time. Without transparency, legal teams only see the damage after it has already been done.
How analytics brings the transformation - from "nice to have" to "essential infrastructure"
Legal spend analytics alters the dynamic when combined with operational discipline.
Consider a live dashboard showing a commercial dispute trending 30–35% over budget while the matter is still underway — well before invoices are approved. This enables legal teams to pause, recalibrate expectations, or adjust strategy while there is still room to act.
Analytics highlight structural inefficiencies. Many teams find they are paying materially different rates for similar work across firms or regions. With this insight, fee arrangements can be revisited, panels rationalised, and savings delivered year on year.
Analytics reveal patterns that are invisible when matters are viewed in isolation — firms that regularly revise budgets, lengthy delays between work completed and invoices submitted, or significant cost variation for comparable litigation across regions. When litigation phases are standardised, these insights become operational rather than anecdotal.
Practical steps legal teams can take
Improved visibility changes the nature of the conversation. Rather than responding to overruns, legal leaders can ask more constructive questions:
Which firms consistently exceed agreed budgets?
Which phases of litigation generate the greatest overruns?
Why do similar matters cost more in one jurisdiction than another?
What work could be handled differently next time?
What are some actions that could create genuine transparency?
This shift moves legal teams from retrospective explanation to proactive control. In practice, spend transparency is achieved through a series of often-overlooked measures:
Ownership: Assign a clearly accountable financial owner to each matter.
Phase-based budgeting: Require firms to submit detailed budgets by litigation stage and track spend accordingly. Review costs at litigation milestones, not by calendar cycle.
Granular time entries: Challenge vague billing descriptions and require meaningful detail. For example, “Document review” should be replaced with “Review and analysis of supplier contracts relating to the XYZ matter”.
Benchmarking: Analytics platforms enable cost comparisons against historical data from similar matters and across the wider market.
Early-warning alerts: Implement automated alerts — for example, when a matter reaches 75% of budget at less than 75% completion — providing time to intervene.
Centralized data: Whether managing UK Employment Tribunals or US securities litigation, consolidating spend data in one place enables pattern recognition that would otherwise be impossible.
As legal teams continue to operate under capacity constraints, many of these controls are increasingly supported through legal operations and analytics-led managed services. When reporting, budget tracking, and invoice review are handled consistently — and integrated with legal systems — in-house lawyers spend less time managing cost and more time managing risk.
The value lies not only in lower spend, but in predictable, defensible decision-making.
The 2026 Reality with Iota Analytics
Finance and procurement teams already rely on real-time dashboards across almost every business function. Legal should not remain the exception. We enable legal teams with real-time data and supporting analytics.
Legal spend transparency is not about mistrust of outside counsel. It is about equipping GCs to operate as strategic business leaders. When the board asks about legal costs, we ensure you have clear, defensible answers.
Legal leaders who adopt analytics will be able to demonstrate measurable ROI, make informed resourcing decisions, and gain the visibility required to run legal as a business function.
The question is no longer whether legal teams should invest in spend analytics, but whether they can afford to continue operating without visibility.
What has been your greatest challenge with legal spend transparency? Please drop us a note at info@iotaanalytics.com, we would love to hear your experience.
