Front The Saga of “Net Spend Anticipation”

In its recent State of the Corporate Law Department report, Thomson Reuters Institute dove into a metric they call Net Spend Anticipation. According to William Josten, Senior Manager, Enterprise Content – Legal, there is reason to question whether GCs and other corporate law department leaders should celebrate an anticipated increase in legal spending.

Given that NSA is a newish metric – the ideas are not new, but the nomenclature has only recently been standardized, Josten takes pains to dissect the metric. “During interviews with GCs,” he explains, “we ask them whether, within the next 12 months, they expect their legal spending to increase, decrease, or stay the same. The actual NSA metric is then calculated by subtracting the anticipated decrease percentage from the anticipated increase percentage.”

But TRI groped for a formal name. Their first stab, net spend optimism, seemed appropriate as the metric generally tends to show legal spend increasing over time. “However,” Justen writes, “as we heard feedback from many general counsel, much of it fell along the lines of ‘I may be anticipating an increase, that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m optimistic about it.’