Budget Season: Time to Audit Your Stack

Budget season has a way of asking the same question every year, and it never gets any easier to answer: what are we actually paying for, and is it working? For legal knowledge and information teams, that question has only gotten harder over the past few years.

That’s because most tech stacks were never really built. They accumulated. A current awareness tool was bought for one practice group. A separate research platform came in for another. Someone trialed an AI tool after a conference last year, and it quietly became a permanent fixture. There’s probably a knowledge management system still running that nobody currently on the team even remembers procuring.

Each of those decisions made sense on its own, at the time. Put them all together, though, and you end up with a stack that’s hard to describe in a single sentence, let alone defend in a budget meeting.

This year adds its own wrinkle. A lot of firms picked up two or three new AI tools over the past twelve months without ever formally retiring whatever those tools were meant to replace. That’s not a knock on the AI investment itself, it’s just how stack sprawl tends to happen: new tools get approved faster than old ones get switched off.

The trouble is that the real cost of all that sprawl rarely shows up on an invoice. It shows up when two teams end up independently building the exact same search, because neither one realized the other already had. It shows up when useful knowledge sits locked inside whichever tool one practice group happens to use, invisible to everyone else. And it shows up in the small manual workarounds people quietly build to bridge two systems that don’t talk to each other. That work never gets logged anywhere. But it still eats a few hours a week per person.

None of that appears on a renewal notice. It shows up instead in how long it takes someone to answer a simple question, or how confidently a budget owner can say a particular tool is earning its keep.

A simple audit, before you defend next year’s number

Before you head into next year’s budget conversation, it’s worth running an honest audit rather than the usual renewal rubber stamp. Four questions do most of the work.

• What do we actually have? Ideally a full list - not the one everyone remembers off the top of their head - including anything a single practice group or partner happens to pay for separately.
• Who’s actually using it, and how often? Not who was handed a license two years ago. Who’s logged in this quarter.
• Where does it overlap? Two tools quietly doing versions of the same job is far more common than most teams expect once they actually look.
• What would we genuinely miss if we cut it? Not “someone might use this,” but a specific workflow that would actually break.

Run through that honestly, and the answer that comes back is rarely “we need more tools.” It’s usually something closer to “we need fewer, better-connected ones, and a clearer sense of what each one is actually for.”

A business case, not a cost-cutting exercise

None of this is about cutting for the sake of it, either. A budget conversation built purely around removing line items reads as cost-cutting. The stronger version of this case is about redirecting spend toward the tools people actually use, backed by real usage data rather than habit. That's an argument built on evidence, not on "we've always had this."

We heard a version of this exact challenge at BIALL this year. Teams everywhere are being asked to justify every subscription while budgets stay flat and the content options in front of them keep expanding. Charles Russell Speechlys ran into it with journal distribution: manually emailing PDFs to lawyers, with no real way to measure who was actually reading them. Once they automated that circulation through Vable, they finally had click-through rates and subscriber numbers to point to, and researchers got their time back for higher-value work instead of chasing distribution lists. You can read more on that panel here: 

That's the same shift worth making with your wider stack. Vable connects your disparate research and current awareness sources, along with the emails and alerts already flooding people's inboxes, into a single feed built around each team's real interests, with the usage data to show what's actually earning its place. Internal knowledge and external sources end up in the same place, instead of three logins away from each other.

That's a different kind of consolidation. Not cutting for the sake of a smaller invoice, but making everything you already pay for actually work together, and proving it. If that's the conversation you're heading into this budget season, we're happy to talk through what it could look like for your team: