On a formal opinion you are buying insurance, not research.
Which is why 464,000 of this spend should keep going out. The addressable part is real, it is smaller than the invoice total, and the difference between those two figures is the difference between a business case and taking on risk your insurer has not seen.
- 1,115,800
- external spend, an in-house team of six
- 371,850
- addressable — 33%
- 464,000
- should stay external
- 73
- instructions a year
What each category is actually buying
Sorted by spend. The two largest are not the two most addressable, which is the point of doing this by category at all.
-
Novel or contested points
11 × 31,000
Judgement on something with no settled answer. Doing the groundwork internally shortens the instruction and lowers the bill without moving the risk.
341,000
Case by case
-
Formal opinions for a transaction
6 × 48,000
A name on a document and the professional indemnity standing behind it. This is insurance, priced as advice, and it is the category most often mistaken for research.
288,000
Keep sending it out
-
Cross-border questions
8 × 22,000
Law you are not qualified in. Nothing on this site changes that and nothing should.
176,000
Keep sending it out
-
Regulatory clarifications
14 × 12,000
Partly research, partly a relationship with the regulator that you cannot replicate. The research half moves in-house; the phone call does not.
168,000
Case by case
-
Routine lookups
34 × 4,200
Somebody else's time reading a published instrument. There is no judgement in this and no insurance value — it is the clearest case on the list.
142,800
Should be internal
Routine lookups are the smallest average bill and the largest volume, which is the shape that makes them worth automating. The mixed categories count at 45% — the research half of the instruction, not the judgement — and the two external rows count at nothing.
What actually changes
The first is the largest lever and it moves no risk at all, which makes it the one to start with.
- The instruction gets shorter
- Most of an external bill on a contested point is somebody reconstructing the background you already had. Sending the groundwork with the question is the single largest lever and it changes no risk allocation.
- You stop asking the easy ones twice
- The same routine question goes out from three different people across a year. A searchable internal answer with its source ends that, and it is where the volume is.
- Panel reviews get an evidence base
- Spend by category and by firm, against turnaround, is a negotiating position at renewal. Most teams arrive at that conversation with an invoice total and nothing else.
- The residual gets more expensive, correctly
- What remains is the hard, high-value work. Average cost per instruction will rise after this and that is the intended outcome, not a failure of the programme.
Four reasons the number is smaller than it looks
The second is the one this whole page is built around.
- Two categories are not savings
- 464,000 of the spend here should keep going out. Counting it would make the case look better and would be advice to take on risk your insurer has not priced.
- In-house answers carry in-house risk
- An opinion from outside comes with somebody else's indemnity. The same conclusion reached internally does not, and that difference is the product being bought.
- It needs somebody to own the answers
- An internal research function without a named owner becomes a folder of stale memos. The saving is real and it is conditional on a person maintaining it.
- Relationships have option value
- Firms you rarely instruct answer the phone slowly in a crisis. Cutting volume to a panel firm is a decision with a cost that does not appear on this page.
371,850 against a 1,115,800 bill is a good year's work. Quoting the 1,115,800 would be easier and it would be advice to stop buying insurance because you have not yet needed it.
The other outcomes
Keep the file in the Kingdom
Where documents go, and where they do not.
Cut review time
The first pass on a document set.
Draft in both languages
Arabic and English that agree with each other.
Never miss a limitation
Counted from the trigger event.
Get juniors productive
The precedent bank a first-year does not have.