Imagine the nice boy at the grocery store loading up the trunk of your car. “How much is all this going to cost?” you ask. “Oh, nobody can say for sure,” he says. “But we’ll send you an invoice in two or three months, or maybe four. Or five.”

If you think about it, this is the reality for corporate law departments (CLDs) when they do not have pricing transparency. Most CLD’s do not know how much their peers are paying and, even if they did, that information isn’t always useful since it lacks detail and context. In fact, the individual attorneys in most CLD’s—the people making the decisions about what to buy and how much—do not have insight into what all the help they are buying is actually costing them, let alone how much it should cost.