A look across thousands of PERSUIT requests from 2020 – May 2026 · with industry-level drill-downs
The questions every GC is asking right now — Are my legal fees going up or down? Is AI making my outside counsel cheaper? Am I using the right firms? — all have answers in the data. Here is what thousands of competitive sourcing events over five years actually shows, told from the buyer's chair — with industry-level drill-downs on the questions that vary most by sector.
The three-line summary
PERSUIT volume grew 7.5× in five years. The 2026 run rate 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 decisions. If you haven't reviewed how you're sourcing legal services recently, you're increasingly in the minority of your peers.
Financial & insurance services is the largest client industry and grew 40× since 2020. Consumer goods & retail (12×), Infotech (21×), and Construction & manufacturing (18×) have all scaled dramatically.
Same 2020 → 2026 annual series as above, scoped to a single industry. Click a tab to switch.
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.
Across specific industries: Infotech legal departments are rotating hard toward M&A (+7.2pp) and away from real estate (-6.2pp). Energy clients are litigating more — four dispute categories gained share simultaneously. Financial services compliance is the dominant growth category platform-wide.
Percentage-point share change between 2020–24 baseline and 2025-YTD, top movers per industry. Click a tab to switch.
Share of requests priced fixed or capped: 72.4% (2020) → 86.7% (2026 YTD). This wasn't law firms waking up to the merits of predictable pricing — it was buyers refusing to accept open-ended budgets. Hourly billing went from 6.4% of requests in 2020 to 2.1% in 2025.
Advisory/Compliance Fixed/Capped share: 81.1% → 90.6% (+9.5pp). M&A Transactional: 75.9% → 85.6% (+9.7pp). Even work that historically hid behind "scope uncertainty" — M&A advisory — is now priced fixed upfront in 86% of cases.
If your outside counsel relationships still involve routine hourly billing for advisory or compliance work, you're paying a premium that the smarter end of the market has already moved away from. The data says your peers are successfully demanding fixed fees. The standard is set.
If your firm is quoting hourly for compliance or advisory matters, you're not out of market — you're a year or two behind it.
Same stacked share-by-year view, scoped to a single industry. Useful for spotting which sectors led — or lagged — the shift to fixed fees.
The AI-deflation story is partly true. Where it is true, it's concentrated in specific categories. Where it isn't, prices are holding or rising. The nuance matters more than the slogan.
Some of the above is simply due to platform and client maturation, not necessarily AI deflation.
When you hold matter size constant (comparing like to like), real compression concentrates in small-to-medium advisory, compliance, and securities work — maybe the categories most amenable to AI-assisted document review and analysis:
Bottom line for in-house teams: If you're spending on small-to-medium advisory, compliance, or securities work, market pricing has moved materially. If you're in M&A or complex bespoke litigation, you're not going to find a deflationary market. Adjust your negotiating posture accordingly.
$5M+ matters: the absolute count is rising in step with overall volume, and competitive sourcing on these matters is increasingly the norm.
The Global 200 dominates. ~91% of $5M+ wins in 2025-YTD went to Global 200 firms, up from ~85% in 2020–24. Within the Global 200, the share is shifting away from the top 10 (26% → 17%) and toward the mid-band cohorts: firms ranked 11–25 (12% → 19%) and 26–50 (20% → 28%) are taking more of the work.
Panel review signal: If your panel is heavily weighted toward the same handful of top-10 firms, the market is showing you that the 11–50 band is doing more of the heavy lifting on mega-matters than they get credit for. The cleanest panel optimisation is rebalancing within the Global 200.
The average PERSUIT request attracts 3.3 firms, and across $500K–$5M matters — the bulk of in-house outside-counsel spend — roughly 70% of requests receive three or more proposals. The platform's most contested category, eDiscovery, averages 4.5 firms per request.
Across Medium, Large, and XL matters, 63–73% of requests receive three or more proposals — and the share rises steadily with matter size. This is the meaningful middle of the market, and it's behaving like a genuinely competitive one: multiple firms, tight pricing, real choice.
$5M+ matters now draw three or more bidders on 75% of requests — the most-contested bucket on the platform. Five years ago, mega-matters were almost universally relationship-sourced; on PERSUIT, the deep firm pool and structured procurement have flipped the default. The "phone the trusted partner" reflex has become "evaluate three serious options" — and on mega-matters more than on any other segment.
On requests under $100K, 43% attract three or more bidders, and another 20% draw two — a respectable number for matter sizes that historically wouldn't have gone to RFP at all. The small-matter segment is the entry point for in-house teams expanding competitive sourcing to lower-value work, and the data shows it's still the least contested bucket.
eDiscovery and Legal Data Services consistently attracts the most bidders — 4.5 average with 84–86% firm response rate. The category is commoditized enough that firms know they have to compete on price, and buyers know to invite multiple vendors. It's the template every other category is converging toward.
If you're running structured competitive RFPs, the data says you'll get a contested field on the matters that matter most. The market is wide, the firms are ready, and your peers are using that depth — three or more proposals on roughly 70% of $500K–$5M work and 75% of $5M+ matters.
86.7% of the market operates on fixed or capped fees. If your outside counsel relationships still involve routine hourly billing for advisory or compliance work, you're paying a premium the market has moved past. The leverage is real; the data confirms it.
Real within-bucket compression concentrates in small-to-medium advisory, compliance, securities, and government investigations work. These are the most AI-automatable categories. Expect push-back, and expect to win. Don't expect the same leverage in M&A or complex bespoke litigation.
~91% of $5M+ matters go to Global 200 firms, but the mix is shifting away from the top 10 and toward the 11–50 mid-band. If your panel is heavily weighted to the same handful of top-10 names, the data says firms ranked 11–50 are doing more of the heavy lifting on mega-matters than they get credit for — a structured review of your panel's depth within the Global 200 is overdue.
75% of $5M+ requests now draw three or more bidders — the highest contestation rate of any matter-size bucket, ahead of even $1M–$5M (73%). The default has flipped from "phone the trusted partner" to "evaluate three serious options." If your biggest matters still go to one or two firms, you're leaving real optionality — and pricing leverage — on the table.
The benchmarks above came from real legal departments running structured competitive sourcing on PERSUIT. If you'd like to see how your own outside-counsel spend compares — or what running an RFP through PERSUIT looks like in practice — we'd be happy to walk you through it.
All figures are drawn from competitive requests run on PERSUIT between January 2020 and May 2026. Matter values are in US dollars, converted at publish-date FX. 2026 numbers reflect five months of data and are flagged as YTD or annualized throughout. Firm rankings use the global firm pool, with everything outside the Global 200 grouped as "Unranked." Industry drill-downs cover the buyer's primary industry; a small share of requests aren't industry-tagged and are excluded from those tabs only. Median values exclude a small number of outliers above $50M to keep them representative.