Your legal work is not so special

PERSUIT is a bellwether for the legal market. Yup I’m saying that. Given the growth of the platform over the past many years, the insights we present now are solid indicators of what is to come and are setting the standard for how corporate legal departments interact with and engage the law firms and others who provide legal services.

The market has really changed, and I hear lawyers like evidence so I’ve compiled… kind of a lot of data to prove it. This newsletter gives you highlights and if you want to drill down into some detail, by industry or matter type, click through to our data website for that detail. Don’t worry, no paywall, no login, no form to fill in, it just loads.

RFP volume on PERSUIT is up 7.5x since 2020 — so the findings below reflect what's happening at scale — not theory, and not as experiments. In the early days, PERSUIT’s largest client sector was Pharmaceuticals and that has continued to grow, but as you’ll see — if you click through to the webpage — other sectors are expanding their use of PERSUIT even faster.

Why this matters for the numbers that follow?

The 2026 run rate (approaching 6k matters annualized) suggests continued acceleration.

This is a proxy for how many in-house legal teams have moved to structured, competitive procurement for outside counsel work. Every data point that follows is drawn from that population of buying decisions. If you haven't changed how you're buying legal services (have you even thought about it?), you're increasingly in the minority of your peers.

False.

This is the common refrain we hear from lawyers all the time. And you/they are probably thinking about fixed fees and other AFAs in the wrong way.

If you are regularly receiving hourly rates for most matters, you're not just off market — you're now a year or two behind it.

If you are already leveraging AFAs for many matters (or phases or activities — which is really how you ought to be thinking about them), great, now the open question remains, are those fixed fees competitive?

PERSUIT has always been about Fixed Fees and Alternative Fee Arrangements (AFAs, EFAs). And there has always been a little share of hourly billing on PERSUIT, but the data shows that the little share is shrinking even further: hourly billing went from 6.4% of requests in 2020 to 2.1% in 2025.

And if you’re a lawyer and thinking, “sure, for those other matter types, but not the work I do.” Sorry, but you’re just wrong. Yes, I have to say it again. Advisory work, M&A, Litigation, you name it — any work that historically hid behind "uncertainty" is now priced fixed upfront — with appropriate assumptions, protections and mechanisms to handle scope changes already in place.

The data says that not only are your peers asking for fixed fees up front for all kinds of work, but that firms are responding in kind. The standard is set — AI is only accelerating it (I wrote that, not Claude).

Click here to see how this changes by industry.

In-house counsel across the board are scoping matters, up front, yes, actually before the work begins (shocking I know!) and they’re doing so more precisely than ever before. Regulated compliance work is up, "general advice" retainers are down — competitive sourcing is being used for complex, specialized matters more, and commodity or unspecified work less.

What this signals

In-house legal teams are unbundling. General "Legal Advice" retainer-style mandates lost almost 3 percentage points of share. Specific, named compliance and advisory work took that share back. Buyers are scoping work more precisely and sourcing it more selectively — a more sophisticated procurement posture that plays directly into competitive pricing.

Is AI reducing your legal fees? The honest answer is: a little and it varies. Anecdotally, from my weekly conversations with law firms, I can tell you it’s still just a bit too soon to see this showing up in the data more than it does today.

But if we peel back some of the onion:

• Prices did fall ~3.1% YoY in 2025. That might seem modest, but when you consider how much rates increased, a fall of 3% is actually quite shocking. And I can confirm this is
• not due to forcing some increased amount of competition — competition was already baked in on PERSUIT, and
• not due to matters getting more (or less) competitive and
• it’s not due to an increased use of auctions — those numbers are very stable year on year.

I can say fairly confidently, this is AI. But it still varies by practice area and matter complexity… Here’s a sample of how median matter values have changed, year on year:

The mega-matter myth: who's actually winning your biggest work?

77% of $5M+ matters go to firms outside the top Global 200. Let that sink in a sec.

Panel strategies or ahem… “cultures” that auto-route (or just accept) sending the largest matters to the most well known firms are likely overpaying.

$5M+ matters grew from 1.4% to 7.9% of all requests between 2020 and 2025 — a nearly 6× share gain. The biggest work is being put to competitive pitch at scale.

Panel review signal: If your preferred supplier list stops at recognizable global brand names, you may be systematically excluding the firms winning loads of those high-value matters.

Again — click to see how this varies by Industry — it varies a lot!

So, key takeaways for in-house counsel?

1. Fixed fees are now expected
2. Negotiate harder for advisory work
3. Reconsider who you’re using for your largest matters
4. Yes this works for your “bespoke” matters too

That’s it for now. And if you made it this far, I’m impressed. If you made it this far and still want more, well actually there IS more in the website I’ve linked to over and over — also, if you want something specific, just reply and ask.

-Jordan