Navigating Legal Cost Control with Zillow’s Director of Legal Operations

Navigating cost control within an in-house legal department can be tricky. Legal teams need appropriate resources to do their work—anything less would expose their organization to undue risk. At the same time, however, no department is immune to the increasing pressure to control costs.

Walking that tightrope can be difficult for any legal leader. I was fortunate enough to sit down with Zillow’s Director of Legal & Compliance Operations Mark Allen, a champion of legal cost control, during a recent webinar to discuss approaches for getting a handle on spend.

Mark has extensive experience thinking creatively about legal spend management, and has implemented strategies that have saved Zillow’s legal team millions of dollars and countless hours. Here are some of the top legal cost control tips that he shared during our chat.

Choosing the Right E-Billing Solution for Your Team

You can’t control costs if you don’t know what they are. You might be surprised at how common it is for legal teams to lack the data insights they need to accurately track—and consequently predict—their expenses.

Implementing an e-billing platform is a great place to start, but it’s not a set-it-and-forget-it solution. The platform you use has to be a good fit for your organization.

Shortly after joining Zillow, Mark made the switch from their legacy e-billing software to Brightflag’s AI-powered platform to gain greater visibility and control over legal spend. And it turned out to be the perfect fit for Zillow’s legal department.

“If you have an e-billing system,” Mark said, “it’s important to figure out whether the tool you have is right for your department. Is it giving you the data you need? Is it being used in the optimal way? And if not, don’t be afraid to make the change, make the business case and switch things up.”

After evaluating the solutions on the market, Mark was “super impressed” with Brightflag. “I was blown away by the usability of the Brightflag interface. But more than anything, it was the A.I., which does the worst part of managing outside counsel work: invoice review, making sure that invoices are not infringing on your guidelines, etc.”

Mark shared that Brightflag’s AI invoice review alone has saved the company millions in outside counsel spend.

Benchmarking Your Outside Counsel Law Firms

Once you have most of your legal spend data in one place and are able to analyze it, the next step is mobilizing those insights to save your legal team time and money. And one of Mark’s favorite ways of doing just that is by comparing and consolidating outside counsel law firms to ensure your legal team is working with their most efficient, cost-effective vendors.

“I know that this can be a tricky thing to navigate within your legal department,” Mark noted. “But really try to build policies or processes that ask attorneys questions on why they’re engaging the counsel they’re engaging.”

By comparing law firm rates, and taking deeper dives into the quality and timeliness of the services each firm provides, the ideal resourcing for your vendors will likely start to come into greater focus. And sometimes those insights may be surprising.

“I think there’s a perception that the larger the law firm, the better the service. And the better the quality of counsel that they’re going to get. But I think you should put data behind your vendors. Really start to collect and show the data on how vendors compare when it comes to timeliness of response, for example, or just cost generally.”

“If one firm is doing pretty good work for $1,200 an hour,” Mark continued, “and another firm is doing that work for maybe that same team or another team for $600 an hour, present that data to an attorney and ask them: is it worth double the price?”

“Many attorneys are smart folks. And they’ll quickly pick that up and say: yeah, it’s a good point. Especially if you’re in a cost-conscious environment. It becomes a part of the zeitgeist a bit.”

More Legal Cost Control Strategies

Perhaps now more than ever, finding creative ways of controlling costs is top-of-mind for legal departments. Which means in-house leaders have their work cut out for them in the year ahead.

Fortunately, these recommendations only scratch the service of Mark’s insights on the topic. If you’d like to learn more tried-and-true strategies for legal cost control from Mark’s extensive experience, be sure to check out the full webinar.