For twenty years, 'litigation management' meant tracking spend and hoping your outside counsel told you the truth. That era is over. The companies pulling ahead are running on something fundamentally different — and it starts with a formula most legal departments have never seen.
I spend most of my time working with General Counsel who manage litigation portfolios worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Some run lean teams with forty open matters. Others oversee thousands of cases across dozens of jurisdictions, multiple practice areas, and a rotating bench of outside firms.
They are all smart. They are all experienced. And most of them are operating with the same fundamental approach to litigation management that existed twenty years ago.
That approach looks like this: track what you spend, collect invoices, read quarterly narratives from outside counsel, update reserves based on attorney judgment, and present a summary to leadership once a quarter. It is built on trust, tradition, and the assumption that if something important changes, someone will tell you.
It worked for a long time. It does not work anymore.
The companies I see pulling ahead have stopped managing litigation in the traditional sense. They have started running intelligence operations. They are not tracking spend and hoping for the best. They are measuring what is changing, identifying severity before it hardens, and making intervention decisions based on data patterns that most legal departments do not even collect.
This is the shift from litigation management to litigation intelligence. And it starts with understanding why the old model breaks.
Let me describe what litigation management looks like inside the majority of Fortune 500 legal departments. Not the aspirational version. The real one.
Cases come in. They get assigned to outside counsel. A matter management system logs the basics — parties, jurisdiction, practice area, assigned firm. Invoices flow in monthly or quarterly. Someone reviews them for billing guideline compliance. A report gets pulled showing total spend by firm, by matter type, by business unit.
Once a quarter, outside counsel submits a narrative update. Two paragraphs, sometimes three. It describes recent activity — depositions taken, motions filed, settlement discussions initiated. It includes a reserve recommendation. The in-house attorney reads it, adjusts the number if necessary, and passes a summary up the chain.
Leadership sees a dashboard. Total open matters. Total spend year-to-date. Maybe a comparison to last year. The conversation in the boardroom is about budget variance, not case trajectory.
Most GCs can tell you what they are spending. Very few can tell you what they are getting.
That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. Spend is an input. What you are getting — the outcomes, the resolution quality, the cost-per-outcome relative to case difficulty — that is the actual measure of whether your litigation program is working. Almost nobody tracks it.
This system was designed for a world where the plaintiff bar was fragmented, verdicts were somewhat predictable, and the pace of change inside a case was slow enough that quarterly reporting could keep up. That world no longer exists.
Nuclear verdicts increased 28% year-over-year. The gap between initial reserves and actual outcomes has widened to 340%. The plaintiff bar is consolidating, data-driven, and better funded than at any point in the last three decades. Quarterly reporting cannot keep pace with this environment.
The old model does not break all at once. It breaks slowly, one case at a time, in ways that are invisible until the number shows up on a settlement check or a verdict form. By then, the outcome was already set.
There is a pattern I keep coming back to in conversations with legal leadership. I call it drift.
Drift is what happens when a case sits too long without a meaningful event. When a negotiation stalls and nobody escalates. When severity hardens — when the probable outcome of a case gets worse — and the change happens so gradually that it never triggers an alert, a phone call, or a strategy review.
Drift is not dramatic. It is not a motion to compel or a surprise witness. It is the absence of action in a case that needed action three months ago.
The most expensive litigation outcomes almost never start with a blowup. They start with drift.
Here is what drift looks like in practice. A premises liability case gets filed. Defense counsel is assigned. Early evaluation puts probable exposure at $200,000. Counsel files an answer, takes a few depositions, and the case enters the holding pattern that most cases enter — where everyone is busy but nothing decisive is happening.
Six months pass. The quarterly report says the case is "in active discovery." The reserve stays at $200,000. But what the report does not say is that the plaintiff’s medical specials have doubled since filing, that a similar case in the same venue just returned a $1.4 million verdict, and that opposing counsel — who the defense firm has faced eleven times — wins 70% of cases that reach this stage without a settlement offer on the table.
None of that information is in the quarterly narrative. Not because anyone is hiding it. Because the reporting structure was never designed to surface it.
By the time the case reaches mediation, the real exposure is north of $800,000. The reserve has not moved. The GC learns about the gap when defense counsel calls to discuss the mediator’s proposal. The case settles for $650,000. Everyone agrees it was a "tough case in a tough venue."
It was not a tough case. It was a case that drifted.
Severity formation — the period during which the probable outcome of a case shifts from the initial evaluation to the number it will actually resolve at — happens in the middle of the case lifecycle. Not at filing. Not at trial. In the months between, when most reporting systems are collecting narratives instead of measuring change.
If you cannot see severity forming before mediation, you are managing outcomes after they have been set. That is not governance. That is reaction.
The GCs I work with who have the least volatility in their portfolios are not the ones with fewer cases or smaller dockets. They are the ones who catch drift early. They see which cases are aging without movement, which negotiations have stalled, and where severity is hardening — and they intervene before the outcome is locked in.
Every board I have briefed asks the same three questions about litigation. The wording changes. The intent does not.
First: Are we exposed? Not "how much are we spending" — that is the easy question. They want to know whether the portfolio contains cases that could produce outcomes significantly above reserves. They want to know if there are concentration risks — too many high-severity cases in the same venue, too much exposure managed by the same firm, too many matters in a practice area where verdicts are accelerating.
Second: Is it getting better or worse? They want a trend line, not a snapshot. Are open matters aging? Is severity increasing across the portfolio? Are new filings accelerating in a particular practice area? A single quarter of data does not answer this. You need trajectory.
Third: Where should we intervene? This is the question that separates governance from reporting. Reporting tells you what happened. Governance tells you where to act. The board wants to know which ten cases deserve executive attention right now — not because they are the biggest, but because they are the ones where intervention will change the outcome.
Most GCs cannot answer these three questions with data. They answer with narratives. They say "we feel good about the portfolio" or "there are a few matters we are watching closely." These are not wrong answers. They are just not defensible ones.
Ask your litigation team one question: which ten cases will cost the most next year? If the answer is a guess, that is your signal.
The shift from litigation management to litigation intelligence is, at its core, the shift from answering board questions with narratives to answering them with data. Not data about spend. Data about trajectory, severity, counsel performance, and probability.
If the old model is track, report, react — the new model is measure, predict, intervene. It has three components. Each one is necessary. None of them alone is sufficient.
The first component is real-time case intelligence. This means having continuous visibility into what is changing inside each case — not once a quarter, but as it happens. Which cases have had no meaningful activity in 90 days? Where has the opposing party made a move that shifts the probable outcome? Which matters have upcoming deadlines that require strategic decisions?
Real-time does not mean checking a dashboard every morning. It means the system surfaces what matters. The GC should not have to go looking for the case that drifted. The case that drifted should find the GC.
The second component is counsel performance calibrated by difficulty. Most companies that track outside counsel performance track win rates or average cost per matter. Both metrics are nearly useless in isolation. A firm that handles straightforward contract disputes in Delaware will have a different cost profile than a firm handling catastrophic injury cases in South Florida. Comparing them on spend tells you nothing.
What matters is spend-to-outcome adjusted for case difficulty, venue, and opposing counsel. A firm that consistently resolves high-difficulty cases below expected severity is outperforming. A firm that consistently spends above benchmark on low-difficulty matters is underperforming. You cannot see this without a model that accounts for the variables that actually drive outcomes.
The Litigation Intelligence Formula: (1) Real-time case intelligence — continuous visibility into what is changing. (2) Counsel performance calibrated by case difficulty and venue — spend-to-outcome that actually means something. (3) Severity signals before mediation — predictability before the outcome is locked in.
The third component is severity signals before mediation. This is where the formula pays for itself. If you can see severity forming — if you can identify the cases where exposure is increasing, where the gap between reserves and probable outcomes is widening, where the window for favorable resolution is closing — you can intervene. You can accelerate settlement conversations. You can change counsel. You can adjust strategy while the outcome is still in play.
Without severity signals, every mediation is a surprise. The defense team walks in with a number. The plaintiff walks in with a number. The gap is larger than anyone expected because nobody was watching the signals that predicted it.
With severity signals, mediation becomes a confirmation of what you already know. The GC walks in with a data-informed view of probable outcomes, historical comparables, and settlement authority based on analytics rather than attorney intuition. That is a fundamentally different negotiating position.
Together, these three components create something that does not exist in the traditional litigation management model: predictability. Not certainty — litigation will always carry uncertainty. But predictability in the sense that you can see where the portfolio is heading, you can identify where it is heading toward bad outcomes, and you can act before those outcomes are locked in.
The difference between a governed portfolio and an ungoverned portfolio is not budget. It is visibility.
The ungoverned portfolio looks fine on the surface. Spend is within budget. The quarterly report shows no surprises. Leadership is comfortable. But underneath, cases are drifting. Severity is forming in three matters that should have settled six months ago. Two firms are running up hours without moving the needle. Nobody sees it because the reporting was not designed to show it.
The governed portfolio looks different. Not because the cases are easier or the budget is bigger. Because the GC can see across the portfolio in real time. They know which cases are aging. They know where severity is hardening. They know which firms are outperforming and which are coasting. When the board asks the three questions, the answers come with data.
The GCs who sleep well at night are not the ones with fewer cases. They are the ones who can see across the portfolio.
That visibility is not a luxury. In an environment where nuclear verdicts are accelerating, where the plaintiff bar is consolidating and getting smarter, and where boards are asking harder questions about total cost of risk — visibility is the difference between governing your litigation program and being governed by it.
If you have read this far, you are already thinking about where your portfolio sits on the spectrum between governed and ungoverned. That is the right question to be asking.
We built a two-minute diagnostic — the Executive Briefing — that maps exactly that. Six questions. No sales pitch. It shows you where your portfolio has visibility and where it has blind spots, benchmarked against what the top-performing legal departments actually measure.
It will not tell you everything. But it will tell you where to look.
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