Leveraging AI to Wield Strategic Control of Outside Counsel Spend—Webinar

Let’s be honest: just “waiting and seeing” how AI shakes out isn’t an option anymore—especially if you’re trying to manage outside counsel spend in a fast-moving company. While everyone is excited about the promise of automation, the reality is that general counsel and legal ops leaders need to set up some serious guardrails first. It’s about making sure your tech acts as a reliable “single source of truth” without letting the quality of your legal work slip through the cracks.

In a recent webinar with Today’s General Counsel, Ryan Galey, Associate General Counsel at Shopify, and Anna Richards, Head of Community at Brightflag, sat down to talk about how modern legal departments are moving away from clunky manual tasks and toward a more strategic, AI-driven way of working.

The session, “How GCs Control Outside Counsel Spend Effectively,” emphasized the importance of building a trusted single source of truth for legal spend by centralizing invoices and accruals. It also called for giving leadership live visibility into spend by team and matter type to support better budgeting and fiscal stewardship.

The conversation centered on a major shift: moving from just reacting to bills to actually being proactive with data. Galey pointed out that the real job of legal ops is to squeeze every bit of value out of the hours billed by outside firms.

In terms of firm management, Galey explained how Shopify built a robust “Model Context Protocol” (MCP) layer on top of its existing legal tech stack to gain granular visibility. By doing this, his team gets a “single source of truth” that it can query internally to see exactly how money is being spent and how AI is performing—all while keeping company data behind its own security walls.

“Understand what your leadership’s priorities are at the business level, and change your approach as the technology changes in terms of how you support that,” Galey said.

Key takeaways from the session:

• Expose the hidden risks: Understand the necessity of “eating your vegetables” by establishing dedicated AI instances and contractual controls that prohibit machine learning on your proprietary data.
• Automate for scale: Identify medium-to-high volume commercial tasks—such as NDAs and assignments—as the first candidates for automation to free up the team for high-value strategic work.
• Leverage granular data: Use AI-driven reporting to track average timekeeper rates to see who is actually staffing matters, ensuring you aren’t paying partner rates for work an associate should handle.
• The “build vs. buy” mindset: Before signing a new vendor contract, evaluate if you can develop the solution internally using existing enterprise AI tools and internal engineering resources.

If your department’s current approach to outside counsel relies on a “wait and see” attitude, you may be missing opportunities to unblock revenue streams. Watch the full recording to learn how to master legal spend management without compromising your department’s professional standards.