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AI Assistant

Spend versus budget questions

The Legal Tracker AI Assistant answers natural language questions about legal spend versus budgets. Compare actual legal spend to approved firm and company budgets across matters, matter groups, firms, and other dimensions.

Legal Tracker AI assistant

The AI Assistant answers questions about matter budgets and actual spend, helping you understand budget performance at a glance. This covers firm and company budgets, single firm or consolidated, matter group budgets, and all budget periods (monthly, quarterly, annually, phased).
The AI Assistant uses firm budgets by default for any calculations and the results it shows. To view company budgets instead, ask for company budget information in your query. It will convert and show both budget and spend amounts in your preferred currency.

Types of questions to ask

Matter‑level spend vs budget
Direct comparisons of spend vs approved budget for a specific matter, across its lifetime or within a defined timeframe.
Examples:
  • Compare the spend vs budget for [matter name].
  • Budget vs actual cost for [matter name] for matter lifetime.
  • What has been our spend vs budget for [matter name] between March 2023 and February 2024?
  • Show a monthly breakdown of spending against the approved budget for [matter name].
Over‑budget and at‑risk matters
Identification of matters that have exceeded, or are approaching, their allocated budget.
Examples:
  • Do we have matters that are over (company) budget?
  • Which matters have exceeded their budget in the last 6 months?
  • List of matters where spending is greater than 80% of the allocated budget.
  • Show a list of matters where spending is greater than 10% of the allocated budget in 2025.
Remaining budget and utilization
Budget consumption, remaining budget, and percentage utilization for individual matters.
Examples:
  • What is the remaining company budget for [matter name]?
  • How much of the budget has been spent for [matter name]?
  • What percentage of the budget has been consumed for [matter name] in 2025?
  • How much budget remains available for [matter name] in the current year.
  • What is the variance between the approved budget and actual spend for [matter name]?
  • List all matters where budget usage exceeded 75% but was not exceeded.
Budget vs spend by group or dimension
Aggregated budget performance across firms, lead company person, practice groups, organizational units, matter types, and other dimensions.
Examples:
  • Show me the spend vs budget by practice group.
  • Which matter groups have exceeded their allocated budget?
  • Show a breakdown of budget vs spend for [firm name] across all matters.
  • Which law firms had the largest spend deviation from budget last year?
  • Which practice group has the largest percentage of unused budget?
  • Retrieve the top 5 law firms with the largest budget overages this year.

Not in scope

The following will be included in a future release:
  • More in-depth questions about matter-specific budgets.

This article applies to:

  • Product: Legal Tracker
  • Audiences: Company

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