Wolters Kluwer’s Enterprise Legal Management (ELM) solutions business has launched an AI-powered outside counsel management tool that allows legal operations teams to compare firms in areas such as cost, staffing and billing compliance.
The company says the software acts as a decision support tool by monitoring staffing efficiency, ensuring that law firms are operating within budget, identifying recurring billing anomalies and comparing market rates.
Operations teams can also pose questions directly to the outside counsel management AI, such as how a firm has performed over time or which firms demonstrate stronger billing compliance.
Dean Sonderegger, senior vice president and general manager of Kluwer’s ELM Solutions business, said: “AI can be a powerful partner when it supports, not supplants, legal judgement. With outside counsel management, we’re activating trusted legal intelligence directly into legal operations workflows rather than another dashboard.
“It utilises a corporate legal department’s own historical law firm performance information, and the more than $230bn in real legal invoice data from Wolters Kluwer’s proprietary LegalVIEW database, to proactively support more transparent outside counsel engagements.”
Sonderegger says insights from that data can help law firms understand, for example, what they are spending on lawyers and whether that expenditure appears to be plausible. The tech also has predictive insight capability by using historical data to estimate budgets and cycle times for legal disputes.
Sonderegger said: “We’re seeing legal operations teams under increasing pressure to control spend and improve vendor governance. Current reporting approaches are typically geared towards explaining what happened, after a decision, rather than influencing decisions as they unfold.”
Legal departments have droves of information that can help shape outside counsel engagements, but it is often buried across a vast pile of invoices, reports and spreadsheets, Sonderegger says.
“That fragmentation makes it difficult to evaluate firms early and objectively, outside counsel management was designed to surface those insights to support legal judgement and expertise,” he added.
In May, the company also announced the integration of its legal AI workspace Libra – which is designed to help lawyers in tasks such as legal research and analysing documents – with Kleos, its cloud-based practice management platform for law firms.
The aim of the integration is to support seamless end-to-end workflows to help lawyers move from research and analysis tasks into its everyday case and matter management system, without having to switch between separate tools or manually copy information.
Other legaltech providers recently launching new products include Thomson Reuters, which last month unveiled its first proprietary large language model, allowing it to move away from the high costs of using typical frontier models to process AI prompts.
This followed legaltech giant Harvey announcing the launch of Harvey II, which promises to accelerate personalised AI work for lawyers and move towards a greater focus on agentic legal tasks.
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