Not on purpose. But when you're getting a narrative summary 90 days after the fact, you're making decisions on stale information. Here's what real-time case intelligence actually looks like — and why the difference matters more than most CLOs realize.
I have read hundreds of quarterly attorney reports. Maybe thousands at this point. They come in as PDFs or slide decks, usually around the same time each quarter, usually formatted the same way. And they all have the same problem.
They tell you what happened. They do not tell you what is changing.
That distinction sounds small. It is not. When you are running a portfolio of 200, 500, or 2,000 active matters, the difference between knowing where you were and knowing where you are heading is the difference between governing your litigation spend and reacting to it.
I spend most of my time working with General Counsels and CLOs who run large, complex litigation portfolios. These are sharp, experienced operators. And almost all of them are making material decisions — reserve adjustments, settlement authority, counsel allocation — based on information that is already 60 to 90 days old by the time it reaches their desk.
Not because they want to. Because the reporting infrastructure they rely on was never designed to do anything else.
Pull up the last quarterly report your outside counsel sent you. It probably contains some combination of the following: case summaries with status updates, billing summaries broken out by timekeeper, a risk rating for each matter (usually low, medium, or high), and maybe a short narrative about recent activity.
On the surface, this looks like useful information. And it is — if all you need is a rearview mirror.
Every data point in a quarterly report is backward-looking. The billing summary tells you what was spent, not whether that spend is tracking toward a reasonable outcome. The risk rating is a point-in-time snapshot that was probably set weeks ago and has not been recalibrated since. The case narrative tells you what your attorney chose to report, which is not the same thing as what you need to know.
There are three specific gaps that matter most.
First, there is no severity trajectory. You get a rating — medium, high — but you do not get a trendline. Is this case getting worse? Is it stabilizing? Has the risk profile shifted since the last report? The quarterly format cannot answer these questions because it only gives you one data point per quarter.
Second, there is no counsel performance comparison. You know what your firm billed. You do not know how that compares to other firms handling similar matters in similar venues. You have no way to evaluate whether the spend-to-outcome ratio on a given case is reasonable or whether you are paying a premium for average results.
Third, there are no drift indicators. A case that has gone quiet for eight weeks looks the same in a quarterly report as a case that is actively progressing. But those are two very different situations, and they require two very different responses.
Your outside counsel is not lying to you. They are just not structured to tell you the truth.
The quarterly report format was built for a world where legal departments tracked matters in spreadsheets and measured success by whether they stayed under budget. That world is gone. The portfolios are bigger, the stakes are higher, and the speed at which cases move has accelerated. But the reporting has not kept up.
Severity does not form on a quarterly schedule. It forms continuously — in discovery responses that reveal new exposure, in venue rulings that shift the playing field, in opposing counsel moves that signal a different strategy than what your team anticipated.
If you cannot see severity forming before mediation, you are managing outcomes after they have been set.
Think about what that means in practice. A premises liability case comes in. Defense counsel sends an early evaluation — exposure looks manageable, reserves set at $250,000. The case enters discovery. Activity is normal for the first few weeks.
Then it starts drifting. Week three, activity slows. Week five, the plaintiff's medical specials increase but nobody flags it. Week eight, opposing counsel — who your firm has faced eleven times and loses to 60% of the time in this venue — files a motion that signals a pivot toward trial. The severity profile is shifting, but nothing triggers an alert because the next report is not due for another six weeks.
By the time that report lands on your desk, mediation is already on the calendar. The real exposure is north of $700,000. The reserve has not moved. You are walking into a negotiation with stale intelligence about your own case.
The gap between initial reserves and actual outcomes widened to 340% last year. Reserves set on stale data produce stale reserves — and stale reserves produce bad financial surprises.
That 340% gap is not an abstraction. It shows up as a reserve adjustment that blindsides the CFO. It shows up as a settlement that exceeds authority because nobody saw the exposure building. It shows up as a board question that the GC cannot answer with data — only with narrative.
And the frustrating part is that the information existed. It was there, embedded in billing patterns and docket activity and case milestones. It just was not surfaced in a way that anyone could act on it in time.
The alternative to quarterly reporting is not more frequent quarterly reporting. Getting the same backward-looking data every month instead of every quarter does not fix the underlying problem. The information architecture itself has to change.
Real-time case intelligence has three characteristics that distinguish it from periodic reporting.
The first is continuous monitoring instead of periodic snapshots. Every case in the portfolio is tracked against expected milestones, billing velocity, and activity patterns. When something deviates from the expected trajectory, it surfaces immediately — not at the end of the quarter. A case that goes quiet for three weeks when it should be in active discovery gets flagged. A billing spike that does not correlate with any filed motion gets flagged. Drift becomes visible the moment it starts, not the moment someone writes a paragraph about it.
The second is performance data calibrated by venue, case type, and opposing counsel. Knowing that a firm billed $180,000 on a case tells you almost nothing. Knowing that $180,000 is 40% above the median for similar cases in that venue against that opposing counsel tells you everything. Calibrated performance data turns billing information into intelligence. It is the difference between tracking spend and understanding whether your spend is producing the right outcomes.
The third is portfolio-level visibility into what is changing. Not a summary of where things stand — a real-time view of which cases are moving, which are stalled, where severity is increasing, and where outcomes are forming. The GC should be able to open a single view and know, right now, which ten matters in the portfolio need attention today.
The goal is not reducing defense spend. The goal is knowing whether your defense spend is producing the right outcomes. Those are fundamentally different objectives, and they require fundamentally different information.
This is not a technology argument. It is an information architecture argument. The quarterly report was designed for a world that moved slowly enough for 90-day snapshots to be sufficient. That world is gone. The plaintiff bar is faster, the data is available, and the companies that build their intelligence infrastructure around continuous visibility will have better predictability, better governance, and better defensibility when the board asks hard questions.
The ones that do not will keep reading quarterly reports and hoping the narrative matches reality.
The GCs who sleep well at night are not the ones with fewer cases. They are the ones who can see across the portfolio.
Visibility is not a nice-to-have. It is the operating advantage. When you can see what is changing across your portfolio in real time, you catch severity forming before it reaches mediation. You catch counsel underperformance before it becomes a pattern you are paying for. You catch drift before a quiet case turns into a loud surprise.
And when the board asks — and they will ask — you have data. Not a narrative that your outside counsel wrote for you. Not a summary that is already two months old. Actual, current, defensible data about the state of your litigation portfolio and the economics driving it.
The legal departments that figure this out first will not just manage litigation better. They will fundamentally change their relationship with the rest of the business — from a cost center that reports backward to a governance function that drives predictability forward.
That shift is already happening. The only question is whether you are leading it or reading about it in next quarter's report.
We built a short assessment that identifies exactly where your portfolio intelligence has gaps — where you are relying on stale data, where you lack visibility into counsel performance, and where severity is forming without anyone watching. It takes about two minutes.
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