If You Can’t Explain Legal Spend, You Can’t Defend It
By Stephanie Corey, CEO | Founder, UpLevel Ops
Over the past year, I’ve noticed a shift in the kinds of questions General Counsel are being asked. It used to be enough to come to the table with a detailed report showing where time was spent, how outside counsel was used, and how the budget tracked against plan. If the numbers were right and the work got done, that was generally sufficient.
That’s starting to change. What I hear more often now, especially from finance and other C-level leaders, is a simpler question, but a harder one to answer: what actually happened here? Not just a breakdown of activity, but an explanation of what drove the outcome, what changed along the way, and whether the same pattern is likely to repeat.
Most legal departments are not short on data. They can produce reports, track matters, and monitor budgets. But when someone asks legal to connect the dots in a way that holds up outside the department, the story can get harder to tell. Not because the work was poorly managed. More often, it’s because the context around the work was never fully captured in the first place.
Too many legal teams mistake reporting for transparency. They are not the same thing.
At the same time, the work itself is changing. AI and workflow tools are compressing timelines in ways that are hard to ignore. Tasks that once took days are now completed in hours, sometimes minutes. As legal work becomes faster and more efficient, the effort behind it becomes less visible, making it harder to rely on effort as a proxy for value.
When a matter comes in over budget or an invoice looks higher than expected, the instinct is to explain it in terms of what was done. That explanation only works if there is a shared understanding of what was supposed to happen in the first place and what changed. In many cases, that foundation is weaker than teams realize. Scope is defined at a high level, assumptions remain implicit, and decisions are made in real time without documentation that makes them easy to revisit.
That becomes a problem when someone asks for an explanation after the fact. Even well-executed work can be difficult to defend if the rationale behind the path taken was never clearly captured.
The teams that navigate this well are not necessarily doing more reporting. In many cases, they are doing less. What they are doing differently is structuring the work up front so the story is easier to follow as it unfolds. They define scope more precisely, make assumptions explicit early, and capture decision points as the matter evolves.
When those pieces are in place, the conversation around spend changes. Instead of walking through a list of activities, the team can point to the original plan, explain what shifted, and describe why. That is a much more familiar conversation for the business because it aligns with how performance is evaluated in other functions.
That challenge becomes particularly visible when legal is asked to justify spend patterns over time or explain why a matter diverged from plan. If the underlying work was not structured in a way that makes those deviations easy to trace, even thoughtful decisions can become difficult to defend in hindsight.
This becomes even more relevant as organizations experiment with alternative fee arrangements. Moving away from hourly billing requires a clear articulation of scope, assumptions, and expected outcomes. Without that structure, it is hard to define what is being priced and even harder to explain when something goes off course.
For General Counsel, the question is not whether more reporting is required. It is whether the current operating model makes it possible to answer, with confidence, what was expected, what changed, and what that means going forward.
As the pace of legal work continues to increase, that distinction becomes more important. The teams that operate most effectively are not necessarily those producing the most output, but those that can explain their work in terms the business understands. Defensibility is not something added at the end. It is built into how the work is structured from the start.
Stephanie Corey is Co-founder and CEO of UpLevel Ops, a legal operations advisory firm. She is a co-founder of CLOC (Corporate Legal Operations Consortium) and LINK (Legal Innovators Network) and currently serves as L Suite Global Chair.
Stephanie has held senior Legal Operations roles at Flex, VMware, and Hewlett-Packard, where she focused on building scalable operating models, improving cost predictability, and aligning legal functions more closely with business strategy. Her work today includes advising legal teams on the practical application of AI within workflows, governance, and service delivery.
She holds an MBA from Lehigh University and a BA in Economics from Wilkes University.
