Legal Tech Buyer’s Guide: How to Make Your First Smart Tech Buying Decision

The legal tech you choose to invest in can significantly impact the efficiency of your in-house team. Make the right choices at the start of your tech buying journey, and you will streamline legal operations and workflows for years to come, while also improving how the department manages its spend.

Get it wrong and you’ve made a potentially costly mistake. One that leaves your team sitting with unused (or worse, unusable) tech in their stack, and sets back your tech adoption efforts when you can’t get buy-in for future investments.

Faced with that conundrum, how do you ensure you’re making the best possible choice? Our detailed legal tech buyers’ guide breaks down the process step by step.

The Importance of Smart Tech Buying in Legal Operations

Why Your First Legal Tech Purchase Matters

Your first legal tech purchase sets the tone for how and why your department is spending money on legal tech. This is important for securing buy-in from other decision-makers. And it means you need to be able to demonstrate clear-cut efficiency gains and improved legal spend outcomes right out of the gate — especially if you’re trying to build the foundation for future tech buying decisions.

A wise investment at the start also gets buy-in from more junior legal team members. If the tech noticeably improves their workflows and quality of life, they’re more likely to use it and promote it, smoothing the way for future adoptions.

How the Right Legal Tech Products Accelerate ROI and Efficiency

Picking the right legal tech products to meet your department’s needs is a big part of the process. The right tools can drastically improve efficiency and speed up ROI, especially if they target a process area where your team is facing significant challenges.

Many legal departments begin building their tech stack with an e-billing solution due to the quick implementation times and high potential for cost savings—which can then be leveraged to purchase additional tools like a contract lifecycle management (CLM) solution.

Regardless of what you choose, if you invest smartly from the start and pick the right tools to address your pain points, your team will see immediate benefits from the technology. And that will automatically translate into being able to deliver higher value to the broader business.

What’s Popular Among Legal Tech Buyers Today

If you’re not really sure where to start or which tech would benefit you most, the good news is that some staple choices would benefit just about any in-house legal team. Here’s what most buyers look into for their first legal tech buying excursions:

The Four Legal Tech Products Every Department Should Evaluate

1. E-billing and Matter Management Solutions

E-billing and matter management solutions are designed to provide teams with detailed visibility into legal spend and matter progress. This makes it easier for your team to track how resources are used and identify errors or billing guideline violations when managing invoices from outside counsel. It also provides a much clearer view into where you’re getting value and where it could be improved.

2. E-signature Tools for Faster Approvals

E-signature tools are designed to expedite turnaround times and approvals on documents, and to facilitate easier audit of the approval trail when needed. They also streamline a lot of the general administrative tasks associated with physical or emailed documents, making it that much easier for your team to expedite important deals and agreements.

3. Contract Management Software for Complete Lifecycle Oversight

Contract management software is designed to handle every aspect of the contract lifecycle — from drafting new contracts (often made easier by clause libraries), to monitoring contract status, version control and even obligation tracking. All of which reduces the risk of oversights and errors, and ensures your team is not spending hours figuring out which version of a contract is current and valid.

4. Document Management Systems for Secure Collaboration

Like contract management, legal document management enables your team to easily track key legal information by centralizing documents in a single repository. Many also give options like access control and integration with other tools, making it easier for team members to collaborate securely, with both internal and external teams.

Why e-Billing Continues to Lead Legal Tech Adoption

So, which of these tools should you prioritize? Honestly, all of these legal tech products can add value for your team, but from what we’ve seen, e-billing and matter management solutions hold the most significant potential for ROI. In fact, the expected ROI from an e-billing solution can be as high as 15%, making it easy to justify investing in this type of tool from the outset, which is why, according to the latest CLOC State of the Industry Report, 84% of legal ops professionals have already implemented these kinds of solutions.

To get a sense of what this might mean for your team, try our handy ROI calculator.

How Modern Legal Teams are Integrating These Tools Seamlessly

In many cases, today’s in-house legal teams are adopting integrated tech stacks that include multiple or all of the legal tools listed above. This approach minimizes the problem of “data siloes,” making it easier to track the department’s entire operational landscape.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to do the same as you start your legal tech buying journey, but it is worth keeping in mind how you might want to expand your tech stack as you begin evaluating potential solutions and vendors. A good strategy is to look at their entire offering, with an eye to the capabilities you might need in future as well as what you need right now.

Trends in the Legal Tech Purchasing Landscape

1. Contract Management on the Rise: Insights from Industry Reports

The most recent Association of Corporate Counsel CLO survey reveals that contract lifecycle management (CLM) is one of the most frequently cited technology categories that CLOs plan to implement (62%) in 2025. Much of that interest is likely fueled by the role these legal tech products play in mitigating risk and ensuring compliance — an attractive proposition in an increasingly complex business legal landscape. As AI integrates into legal tech, these systems will undoubtedly play an even more pivotal role in keeping companies’ contract lifecycles on track.

Trend takeaway: A CLM system may be worth considering if you find that a considerable chunk of your team’s time gets eaten up by contract management tasks.

2. The Role of AI in e-Billing Platforms and Controlling Legal Spend

Another area where AI is gaining traction is in e-billing solutions. Using AI, top-end platforms are now providing legal teams with predictive insights, anomaly detection, and real-time analytics, making it easier than ever to fine-tune budgets and reduce legal spend. The addition of GenAI tools to the mix also enables legal teams to access data insights from these systems efficiently, facilitating more strategic operations and informed budget management. No surprise, then, that more than 50% of surveyed legal teams were already using this technology in some capacity by the end of 2024, with another 23% stating they planned to add it.

Trend takeaway: AI is here to stay. And the most innovative teams are finding ways to integrate it into their workflows.

3. Why Legal Tech Buyers Are Prioritizing Cost Control and Automation

Another everyday reality for in-house teams is a growing shift towards cost control, automation, and process efficiency to improve the value that legal delivers. In tech terms, that means prioritizing tools that: streamline approvals, standardize processes (reducing risk), help monitor spend, and enable strategic decision-making. In many cases, teams are turning to fully integrated enterprise legal management platforms to meet these needs and to support them in prioritizing automation and cost control across the entire legal process landscape.

Trend takeaway: Tools that help you control costs and optimize efficiency through automation should be top of the priority list.

4. Aligning Legal Tech Buying with Your Organization’s Broader Business Strategy

Another factor driving tech buying decisions is that legal leaders are increasingly trying to align their department’s outputs with broader business priorities. What this means is that tech options that speak to immediate business needs are placed at the top of the priority list, with cost control (as discussed above) often being the major driver.

Trend takeaway: As you navigate your initial tech buying decisions, be sure to check in with leadership in other teams and to prioritize purchases that demonstrate value in terms of broader business goals.

Where to Start Your Legal Tech Buyer’s Journey

As this legal tech buyer’s guide outlines, your initial legal tech investment should focus on:

• Easily-provable ROI
• Your team’s most pressing needs
• Broader business objectives

You should also consider your longer-term tech buying horizon — and how the purchases you make now align with those you plan to roll out later.

Your best starting point? Consider partnering with an established legal tech vendor like Brightflag. With decades of experience in the space, Brightflag makes it easy for any team to get started with cutting-edge legal tech, including the latest tools like GenAI. Book a personalized demo with us to learn more.

Legal Tech Buying FAQs

What are the key factors to consider before selecting a legal tech vendor?

Evaluate product features, integration capabilities, user experience and customer support. You can often get a good sense of a vendor’s track record by checking out reviews.

How can legal teams calculate ROI for their legal tech investments?

Ensure you have clear KPIs in mind upfront, then track how the solution improves efficiency and generates cost savings. You can also consider factors like error reduction to gain a more comprehensive understanding of performance.

How can in-house counsel gain internal buy-in for new legal tech products?

Tech buying, like any expense, needs to be justified. A good starting point is making sure your intended purchases align with broader business objectives. And then ensuring you have the KPIs and data points needed to prove performance.

How does AI-powered legal spend management differ from traditional financial tracking tools?

Legal tech products are evolving at a rapid pace. Adding AI to the legal tech mix enhances compliance, analytics, and reporting — all of which have a positive impact on your team’s ability to manage legal spend proactively. This goes far beyond the capabilities of traditional tracking tools, ensuring you can manage spend (and your team) more strategically.