Buying Legal agenda makes effort, complexity and panel fit procurement variables

On September 29, Buying Legal Council opened its New York conference with sessions on AI-driven provider selection, whether firms belong on panels and how buyers can decompose legal work into cost, value, complexity and effort. The agenda treats the billable hour debate as a measurement problem rather than a binary choice between hourly and fixed fees. Client teams should expect procurement functions to ask for more granular staffing, process and technology assumptions before approving a fee structure. A second-order implication is that panel defense will increasingly depend on structured performance evidence that relationship partners cannot supply from memory alone.