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 four-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 grew from 1.4% to 7.9% of all requests between 2020 and 2025 — a nearly 6× share gain. In telecom, 32% of all requests are now $5M+. The biggest work is being put to competitive pitch at scale.
This is the counterintuitive finding: firms outside the Global 200 won 77% of $5M+ matters in 2025 — up from 72% in 2020-24. The Global elite cohorts combined for 23% of mega-matter wins.
Panel review signal: If your preferred supplier list stops at recognizable global brand names, you may be systematically excluding the firms winning most of the platform's highest-value work. At minimum, this is worth a structured look.
Share of accepted $5M+ proposals by firm Global ranking cohort, 2020–24 baseline vs. 2025-YTD. Click a tab to switch.
The average PERSUIT request attracts 3.4 firms, and across $500K–$5M matters — the bulk of in-house outside-counsel spend — about two-thirds 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, 62–66% of requests receive three or more proposals. 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 51% of requests. Five years ago, mega-matters were almost universally relationship-sourced; on PERSUIT, more than half are now competing for attention from a deep firm pool. The platform has converted "phone the trusted partner" into "evaluate three serious options" — and that share keeps rising.
On requests under $100K, 54% still attract three or more bidders — a strong 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.
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 two-thirds of $500K–$5M work.
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.
77% of $5M+ matters go to firms outside the Global 200. If your preferred supplier list is limited to recognizable global brand names, you're systematically missing the firms winning most of the platform's highest-value work. A structured panel review with broader firm criteria would pay for itself.
More than half of $5M+ requests now draw three or more bidders, and 66% of $1M–$5M matters do the same. The deep firm pool that delivers this competition includes specialists and mid-market firms most in-house teams wouldn't surface through relationship networks. If your biggest matters still go to one or two firms, you're leaving real optionality 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 16,656 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.