Inside Axiom

One Simple Question that Can Unlock Millions in Legal Savings

October 2025
By David McVeigh

One Simple Question that Can Unlock Millions in Legal Savings

Long before becoming the CEO of Axiom, I was a partner at McKinsey. As a management consultant, I came to appreciate the power of simple frameworks to help identify opportunities to improve efficiency and effectiveness. These opportunities were almost always hiding in plain sight.

At Axiom, we’ve identified a straightforward yet incredibly effective logic model that can help in-house teams unleash huge savings opportunities. These savings can, in turn, help fund strategic initiatives (AI), expand team capacity, and accelerate a team’s transformation from being a necessary cost center to a celebrated value creator.

GCs recognize the need to rethink budgets more than ever. Our recently published Axiom-Harris Poll 2026 Budget Study found that 49% of legal departments have already started evolving budgeting from a risk management/cost-center mentality to driving more value, with another 36% planning additional changes in 2026.

💡Uncover the key trends shaping in-house strategy and what they mean for the year ahead.

The framework we identified is an easy and reliable way to get significantly more value from your budget. We call it the “250 Hours Rule,” and it boils down to one simple question: “Where do you have individual timekeepers from your law firms who are billing 250 hours a year or more?”

Most GCs don’t actually know until they ask, since 250 hours is around 5 hours a week and below their approval threshold.

Here’s why asking this question is so effective. Let’s say an average law firm associate charges around $800 an hour. Engaging that lawyer for 5 hours a week will cost approximately $200,000 over a 50-week period. Depending on the size of the legal team’s budget and the number of lawyers the team engages at that level, those outlays can add up fast and quickly drain the budget.

What’s more, if the law firm is billing your organization 250 hours for an associate’s time over an entire year, it’s likely the work he or she is doing is relatively routine and doesn’t justify the heavy price tag.

This type of “run the company” work is exactly in Axiom’s sweet spot, and we do it with experienced, AI-empowered attorneys who have the highest client satisfaction scores in the industry—at a fraction of what you pay your law firm for the same work.

Take the scenario above and now imagine paying an Axiom attorney—who is as good or better than the law firm associate—$350 an hour. The difference might seem slight for a short-term engagement, but over a 50-week year that’s $100,000+ in savings.

That, of course, is $100,000 the in-house team can allocate elsewhere. And by “finding your 250 hours” across the team, you might find multiple $100,000s or more that can be saved once you start looking. This can easily reach into millions in legal cost savings for Fortune 500 in-house teams.

SEE WHAT YOU COULD BE SAVING 

The bottom line: Use the 250 Hours Rule to find law firm engagements consuming 250 hours or more for “run the company” work. Then take that work—and any future work expected to require 250 hours or more annually—and switch it to Axiom. It’s like swapping out an incandescent light bulb with a high-efficiency LED that does the same job for pennies on the dollar.

 

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Posted by David McVeigh

David McVeigh, Chief Executive Officer at Axiom, has over 30 years of experience in business leadership, management consulting, and private equity portfolio company management. Prior to Axiom, he served as Gartner, Inc.’s Executive Vice President, Global Business Sales, and as a member of its operating committee. There, he led a global sales organization responsible for $650M in revenue of subscription-based research and advisory services. Prior to Gartner, Mr. McVeigh was a Managing Director at Hellman & Friedman, an Operating Partner at The Blackstone Group, and a Partner at McKinsey & Company. David graduated from Columbia University with a Master of Business Administration (M.B.A.). He also holds a master’s degree in Chemical engineering from Stanford University and a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Lafayette College.

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