Bodhala
An AI-Powered SaaS Platform To Effectively Predict, Manage, and Optimize Legal Spend

It is long overdue that just like companies in other industries, law firms and legal departments realize the importance of the abundance of unstructured data available for use. “Taking the ambiguity out of spend decision and redefining how corporations manage their legal expense had become a necessity,” begins Raj Goyle, the Co-Founder & Co-CEO of Bodhala. “The outdated way of managing overall spend through Excel spreadsheets needed a replacement.” From improving business standards to market-driven pricing—evaluating and comparing legal spend to market rate by leveraging the insights from the comprehensive data sets of law firms through big data analytics helps drive smarter data-driven decisions. Targeting the problem that has vexed the entire sector for decades, Bodhala empowers businesses with an AI-powered system that helps analyze, manage, and optimize outside legal counsel costs, helping customers derive maximal value.

In an interview with CIO Applications, Goyle shares his insights on Bodhala’s value proposition and its unique offerings for the legal sector.

What are the major challenges you are aiming to resolve in legal industry, and how does Bodhala’ solutions help overcome them?

The typical corporate legal department is not very vigilant about its legal spend. In many cases, they don’t even have their own invoices in any actionable form, and have no data for evaluating and comparing their legal spend to market rate to know if they are getting the best value for the dollar they are spending. As efficient data management becomes crucial for corporations, the need for cutting companies’ legal costs is slowing taking center stage in the marketplace. From legal spend analytics to spend optimization, cost-effective data-driven decisions have become a must to improve the partnership between a company and their outside firm in terms of overall transparency, equitability, and accountability. Ketan Jhaveri and I started Bodhala in 2013 as a legal analytics firm that empowers businesses to analyze, manage, and control outside legal counsel costs.

What are the key offerings of Bodhala?

We are spearheading the industry in optimizing enterprise legal spend on outside counsel through our proprietary AI-backed platform. We are giving our clients the power of a real-time industry benchmark by evaluating existing legal spend and comparing to market rates, an approach that has never existed before in a legal system. Our platform can take the mass quantity of data, analyze it, and provide actionable easy-to-use insights.

It unlocks the power of big data and machine learning to equip law departments and firms with the necessary data required to make crucial business decisions efficiently.

Its powerful machine learning engine—Hercules—provides our clients with actionable, easy-to-use insights by handling earlier disparate data, surfacing the information extracted, and optimizing the purchase patterns for critical legal services. With billions of data points, Hercules provides clients with a visually driven, custom dashboard that is easy to use. Hercules analyzes data from public filings, 5000 law firm business models, and several lawyers’ spend analysis to provide clients with the most impactful insights of the legal industry. We assist the users in evaluating and comparing their legal spend to the market rate for making smarter data-driven decisions about budgets across current service providers and alternatives. From identifying staffing inefficiencies, measuring timekeeper level diversity, captivating opportunities to consolidate work across law firms to real-time benchmarking from its Hercules database, our solution provides efficient legal spend optimization. Moreover, with our analytics platform, we enable the legal operations professionals to gain powerful analytics on legal spend and operations. It extends the client’s capabilities beyond eBilling to drive effective data-backed decisions.

Can you share a case study with us where Bodhala assisted a client in attaining the desired outcome with its offerings?

A client approached us as their legal department was spending a significant amount of money with no overall financial insight. Their in-house legal team, financial analysts, and the procurement team had worked very hard to optimize workloads and spend. They had a deep interest in optimizing their spend category. They had invested considerable time trying to understand the rate and the pricing of what the law firms vary actually charging them and how they were performing their legal services.

When we got them on-boarded, we were able to give our client an unprecedented new understanding of how the law firms were actually performing the legal work. We provided the client with their overall legal spend analytics and insights with the help of on-demand executive-level dashboards and detailed reporting of data. By evaluating and comparing their legal spend against market rates, we were able to give them real-time industry benchmarks so that they could make better decisions about budgets across current service providers and alternatives. With these observations, the client was able to transform the way they communicated and negotiated with outside law firms and managed their relationships with law firms. Ultimately, we were able to save our client millions of dollars.

What differentiates Bodhala from its competition?

Our platform offers companies a workflow into discovery, procurement, pricing, and evaluation of counsel. Being a legal procurement company, we are providing visibility and transparency for in-house attorneys seeking to engage the right outside counsel for the right price. It’s a task justifying our name, which in Sanskrit stands for “the illumination of talent.” With our insights, we empower in-house legal departments to efficiently forecast legal spends, as well as assess potential outside representation for significant matters, without bias.

What is the roadmap you have envisaged for Bodhala?

We are happily engaged as partners in the larger legal ecosystem because we have partnerships with some large procurement organizations who are trying to optimize the legal spend category. We have also partnered with a few large consulting organizations that provide transformation and innovation to various business enterprise units. As the legal industry moves toward value-based and not just time-and-seniority-based pricing and counsel selection, the workflow our platform offers help clients to save millions of dollars each year. Our actionable dataset and team expertise have made us the first choice of the law firms for insights on matters of legal data and trends in Big Law. Our aim is to grow as a team, increase our revenue, and expand our client base while ensuring the highest standards of legal work. We believe Bodhala can become the backbone of the legal industry.