The Poppy ROI Calculator: Our Approach
As an in-house legal professional, you know that effectively managing legal spend is crucial.
The value of a dedicated legal spend management tool is intuitive as you understand the challenges of unclear spending patterns, the frustration of inconsistent billing guideline enforcement, and the missed opportunities to drive better legal and financial outcomes without firm performance insights.
However, translating that intuitive understanding into concrete numbers – the kind needed to secure budget and broader team buy-in – can be a challenge.
This is where quantifying the Return on Investment (ROI) becomes essential, and that's why we set out to develop an ROI calculator of our own.
Our Approach
Now, we'll admit, we're often skeptical of ROI calculators. Many feel designed to produce impressive-sounding numbers rather than realistic, actionable insights.
We decided that our approach had to be different, grounded in two core principles:
Transparency:
We show our work. All assumptions and calculations are visible, allowing you to adjust them based on your team's specific situation.
Conservatism:
We deliberately use conservative default assumptions.
Our goal isn't to inflate the numbers, but to provide a realistic estimate you can trust.
How Poppy Legal Drives Measurable Returns
Our ROI calculator focuses on two primary areas where a tool like Poppy Legal delivers quantifiable value:
Reducing Direct Legal Spend: This comes from automatically enforcing billing guidelines, catching errors and potential duplicate charges, and surfacing data-driven opportunities for negotiating discounts or exploring Alternative Fee Arrangements (AFAs). While industry estimates often suggest potential savings of 5-15% or more, our calculator starts with a deliberately conservative default assumption of 2.5% – a figure you can easily adjust. Even modest improvements here can significantly impact the bottom line.
Saving Valuable Team Time: Think about the time spent on manual invoice review, back-and-forth communication with outside counsel regarding billing questions, and potentially manual data entry for spend tracking. Poppy Legal automates much of this. Our calculator helps quantify this efficiency gain based on the number of invoices you process and the estimated cost of your team's time. Again, we use conservative defaults (like assuming only a 40% time saving on review, even though it's often higher) which you can tailor to your reality. We even provide the option to exclude time savings from the ROI calculation entirely if you prefer to focus solely on direct cost reduction.
Calculate Your Potential ROI
We believe that seeing realistic numbers, based on transparent and conservative assumptions, is the most helpful way to understand how Poppy Legal can empower your in-house team.
With those thoughts in mind, we encourage you to use the Poppy Legal ROI Calculator to plug in your own assumptions and get a clearer, data-driven picture of the value Poppy Legal could bring to your team.
