A Field Report: Practical Insights from Establishing an Innovative Legal Spend Management System at Deutsche Bahn

In our experience, there are three key points for successfully establishing and running a modern Legal Spend Management system in order to generate significant value for Deutsche Bahn group of companies (DB), DB’s legal department and DB’s business of selecting outside legal counsel. Firstly, in order to get a full picture of our rationale behind selecting outside legal counsel we had to carry out a full-scale analysis of our demands and our requirements for external legal services. Based on this analysis we were able to recognize certain patterns regarding our needs and requirements to be fulfilled for outside legal services, to look at our legal spend with a broader strategic view, and to plan when and where we spend money for legal services (Sect. 2.1). Secondly, for the legal department to face the task of fundamentally rethinking our outside counsel management together with the DB procurement department based on a clear allocation of responsibilities brings together the best of two worlds that is currently mainly located in rather separate functions (Sect. 2.2). Thirdly, in order to truly control our outside legal counsel business, we needed to find ways to collect and organize, as well as understand relevant data concerning our outside legal counsel relationships and make that data available to those who have to work with it. Aiming at an equally modern as well as efficient and user friendly long-term solution, we finally managed to integrate these tasks of data exploration and data analysis in a fully digitalised retainer management workflow. And even though developing such single all-encompassing integrated digital solution was hard work, it was worth taking the challenge in order to finally get a full lifecycle view on our overall legal spend (Sect. 2.3).