ACC Corporate Counsel Now: Legal Teams' Data Infrastructure Is Not AI-Ready — Outside Counsel Spend Tracked by 83%, Performance by Only 12%

ACC's Corporate Counsel Now (July 30) published research on in-house legal team data infrastructure readiness for AI, finding significant gaps: outside counsel spend is tracked by 83% of teams, but time to resolution is tracked by only 28%, outside counsel performance by only 12%, and impact on business outcomes by only 9%. Top barriers to metrics tracking are lack of time or resources (57%), data scattered across systems (50%), limited automation tools (43%), and difficulty aligning metrics with business priorities (29%). The article calls for a modern legal data foundation: centralised source of truth for spend, matters, and documents; system integrations reducing manual reporting; clear taxonomy and data governance standards; and automated data cleanup. For law firm BD and client relationship directors: the 12% tracking outside counsel performance figure means most GCs are making outside counsel decisions without systematic performance data. The firms that build and share performance intelligence with their clients — structured reporting, matter outcomes, AI-disclosed billing detail — are filling a gap that 88% of GC offices are currently navigating without good data. Client teams that proactively supply performance metrics are, in effect, doing the client's data work for them.