Financial & Vendor Management

Legal Departments are no longer given a blank check to resource the company’s legal needs. Today, in-house teams must operate with the same financial discipline as other business units, making it essential to manage legal spend with visibility, predictability, and strategic intent.

UpLevel Ops empowers Legal Departments to take control of their outside counsel and vendor relationships through data-driven management strategies. We create legal spend assessments that identify significant cost-saving opportunities across the entire legal department. Our recommendations often include tailored outside counsel programs (including law firm panels), value-based fee arrangements across all practice areas, ALSP opportunities, budget management, performance scorecards, creation of metrics and dashboards, and any potential opportunities to pull legal work in-house to reduce outside spend.

With our decades of in-house legal ops experience, we have helped clients achieve:

• Significant cost reductions (20% – 50%) and important increases in budget predictability
• Strong gains in internal process and administrative efficiency
• Better communications and alignment between the business units and the legal department

 

Our approach to the management of outside counsel relationships will not only improve communications between the in-house team and their law firms, but it will set performance expectations with those firms and create processes to validate that performance through metrics and KPIs.

How UpLevel Ops Can Help

We work closely with corporate legal departments to develop and implement custom Financial and Vendor Management programs that:

• Provide budget predictability through structured financial planning, forecasting, and pricing models
• Spot trends in legal spend to uncover cost-saving opportunities
• Enhance relationships with finance, outside counsel, and vendors through data-backed communication
• Optimize legal technology (eBilling, RFP tools, data analytics) to drive efficiency
• Build structured programs for outside counsel and vendor management, including:
  • Matter intake processes
  • Firm onboarding and evaluation scorecards
  • Billing guidelines and retention agreements
  • DEI initiatives for law firms and vendors
  • Robust metrics and analytics for better decision-making

 

Optimizing Legal Spend with Value-Based Pricing

A key driver of cost savings is moving away from hourly billing and towards Value-Based Pricing (VBP). Legal departments that implement VBP regularly see:

• 20% – 50% savings on outside counsel spend
• Budget predictability with fixed costs tied to deliverables and results, not hours
• Lower administrative burden by eliminating invoice reviews and accruals

 

VBP aligns incentives between legal teams and outside counsel, rewarding tasks, activities, deliverables and results over effort. UpLevel Ops helps legal departments implement alternative fee arrangements (e.g., fixed fees, tiered pricing, success-based fees) using competitive processes to ensure legal spend reflects actual value delivered.

To supercharge our strategic pricing expertise, we’re thrilled to welcome Ken Callander to the UpLevel Ops Advisory Team! As the Managing Principal of Value Strategies and a recognized thought leader in VBP, Ken has helped countless legal departments significantly reduce outside counsel costs and implement strategic pricing models across all areas of law. His insights and hands-on experience will be invaluable as we continue to guide legal teams toward smarter, more efficient financial management.

How We Can Help You Implement VBP and Cost Control

StrategiesAmong other things, UpLevel Ops can help with:

• Developing and implementing VBP programs to reduce legal spend
• Assessing internal work allocation (make vs. buy) and outside counsel staffing expectations
• Building structured outside counsel panels specific to practice area and region
• Optimizing legal technology (eBilling selection, RFP tools, reporting dashboards)
• Creating and running RFPs to select cost-effective, high-value vendors
• Creating and conducting vendor selection processes and interview strategies
• Developing scorecards and quarterly business reviews (QBRs) to track law firm performance

 

UpLevel Ops is ready to help you take control of your legal spend and vendor relationships. Let’s discuss how we can create a financially strategic, high-performing legal department for your business.