More corporate legal departments are becoming wise to the power of data analytics to help align their ongoing projects with an organization’s spend management goals. However, insights into matter-related spending or other key legal functions such as contracts may be more readily accessible from some legal service providers than others.

During a Penn Law webinar held last Wednesday, panelist Connie Brenton, chief of staff and senior director of legal operations at NetApp Inc., emphasized that the data ALSPs collect from clients can help legal departments identity functions they need to scale up or down. “One of the unintended consequences of having worked with alternative providers is we can get good metrics with ease. So we can ask the Elevate team to measure everything,” she said.