A legal department’s list of outside counsel and service providers has always been a living document that shrinks and expands based on the organization’s needs. However, those decisions may ultimately be rooted less in science, such as data analytics, than they are in personal relationships and gut-level intuition.

Still, numbers can and sometimes do play a role in deciding which firms or service providers rank at the top of a legal department’s preferred providers. The in-house team at General Motors, for example, used data relating to specific factors such as geographic location, expertise, diversity and hourly rates, to help cull their stable of law firm providers from 900 down to 19.