Vahura Insights: Preparing and Tracking Legal Budgets

In addition to our popular talent tracker, this edition of Vahura Insights also focuses on how Corporate Legal Departments approach their budgeting process.

Legal costs feature as an important item in the balance sheet. In the five-year period between 2013-14 and 2017-18, India Inc.’s legal and compliance costs have increased 56.73% from INR 14,486 crore to INR 22,705 crores. This has led GCs to focus sharply on validating their budgetary requirements and getting the best possible value from those budgets.

To understand the strategy behind preparing and tracking legal budgets, we conducted the Vahura Legal Budget Survey 2019 (In-House Edition) to dive deeper into the legal budgeting decisions and the fundamental ways in which legal departments approach this process. The study is comprehensive and covers multiple facets of budgetary planning including defining budget components; the decision making process; the planning methodology; as well as the differences between top-down and botton-up budgeting. In addition to this, what we believe would be especially useful for general counsels are the 12 best-practices that general counsels should follow in while preparing and tracking legal budgets.