Extract from Casey Sullivan’s article “Corporate Spending on Law Firms Dropped 24 Percent Last Year”
Corporate legal departments are in-housing more services and spending dramatically less on outside law firms. All told, large and mid-sized companies’ external spend decline by nearly one quarter, according to a new report by the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium, or CLOC.
Last year, CLOC’s 2019 State of the Industry Report reveals, in-house legal departments cut their external spending by 24 percent. In 2017, 62 percent of legal spend was directed externally. Last year, that was just 46 percent. That’s a decline of 16 percentage points year over year and, for large and medium-sized companies, a 24 percent reduction in external spend. To get these numbers, CLOC surveyed 213 companies across 32 industries, representing 12 percent of the Fortune 500 and a collective $6.3 billion in external legal spend.
