Why CFOs and legal leaders can't agree on who controls legal budgeting

Recent studies show that CFOs and legal leaders rate their relationships highly. Yet when the topic turns to budgeting, the alignment stops. Half of CFOs believe they control how legal spend is set. Only a third of legal leaders say the same about their own authority. Both sides are confident. Neither side agrees.

The reason is simple.

Finance is planning quarters ahead, while legal is working with information that often lands long after the decisions that shaped the spend. Forecasts built in good faith start to drift. Invoices arrive that tell a different story from the one the business thought it approved. Each team defends its position using the data it has, and the disconnect becomes structural rather than personal.

Legal wants autonomy to run its function. Finance wants predictability across the enterprise. Both expectations are reasonable. Neither is achievable when the only reliable data appears at the end of the cycle.

Today, we’ll examine why this tension persists and how continuous visibility gives CFOs and legal leaders the common foundation they need to plan with confidence.

Why Finance and Legal can’t agree on legal budget control

Finance and legal work toward the same outcomes, but the way they budget couldn’t be more different. The processes appear aligned, yet they run on separate timelines and rely on information that arrives at very different speeds.

Recent research from Axiom shows that 86% of legal departments still need multiple approvals for spending decisions, even when budgets are already agreed. It’s a sign of how quickly the process fragments once real matters get underway.

How finance approaches the budget

Finance plans across quarters. They model exposure early, pressure-test assumptions, and watch for anything that might affect cash flow or board reporting. Their view of the budget depends on:

• Early indicators they can trust
• Predictable numbers each quarter
• Cost discipline across the wider business

If a forecast moves late in the cycle, finance loses stability. So the function that can keep forecasts steady tends to hold practical control.

How legal approaches the budget

Legal sits inside the work itself, where conditions shift fast. The biggest cost drivers appear long before an invoice shows up. For example:

• Scope changes that weren’t visible at intake
• Staffing moves in response to complexity or risk
• Litigation deadlines that accelerate activity
• Matters that evolve in ways no annual plan can anticipate

Even so, many legal teams still rely on invoice-driven updates or scattered firm communication. Only 33% of CFOs and legal leaders review ROI together each year, which means both sides are working from different interpretations of performance.

And it builds from there. The issue deepens because each function reacts to a different set of signals as the year unfolds, and neither is seeing the full financial picture, as it happens.

What each team sees when data arrives late

Once visibility lags, finance and legal start shaping the budget around different indicators.

Finance sees:

• Variances landing too late to adjust the quarter
• Movements that conflict with the strategic plan
• Actuals that no longer match earlier forecasts

Legal sees:

• Questions that miss what actually happened inside the matter
• Pressure to justify work after it’s already been done
• Constraints that don’t reflect the reality they’re managing

Both teams believe they’re acting responsibly. Both are using the information in front of them. The issue is that the information doesn’t arrive at the same time or with the same meaning.

Late visibility pushes finance and legal into parallel budgeting cycles that rarely come back together. Forecasts drift. Conversations turn reactive. Legal’s autonomy suffers. Finance’s predictability suffers. Not because either team lacks capability, but because the information they rely on never aligns early enough to influence the outcome.

Why invoice-driven reporting limits legal spend management and budgeting control

Most budgeting friction starts long before a forecast drifts or a variance report lands. It begins with the simple fact that invoices arrive too late in the lifecycle to support real control. By the time a bill shows up, the decisions that shaped the spend are already in the past.

For legal, this creates a constant catch-up cycle.

Leaders want to update the business on burn, scope, and exposure, but the numbers they receive are already lagging. Even experienced teams end up working from firm updates, historic patterns, or a best estimate of where the work currently stands.

Finance feels the impact just as sharply.

Late actuals unsettle quarterly forecasts, complicate cash planning, and prompt questions about overruns when there’s no longer time to correct the trajectory. The tension isn’t about trust in legal’s judgment. It’s about the timing and completeness of the information.

This is when the budgeting relationship starts to break down. Legal can only forecast what it can see. Finance can only trust what it can verify. When both functions depend on documents that arrive weeks or months after the work is done, the budgeting process becomes reactive by design.

The deeper problem is that invoices only capture one dimension of the work: the hours billed. They don’t explain why costs moved, where scope shifted, or how staffing changed to protect the business. They show the financial outcome, not the operational story behind it.

Which means both teams start asking different questions, shaped by different pressures:

Finance asks:

• Why did the number move this late?
• What changed that wasn’t visible earlier?
• How do we avoid this next quarter?

Legal asks:

• Why is this coming up now instead of earlier?
• How do we provide context when the work is already complete?
• How do we improve predictability when the data arrives after the fact?

At this stage, budgeting turns into reconciliation. Leaders spend more time defending numbers than shaping them. Both sides feel blindsided. And neither function gets the clarity needed to guide decisions with confidence.

Until both teams can see how costs are developing while the work is in motion, invoice-driven reporting will always keep them a step behind the real financial picture.

Why traditional legal eBilling can’t deliver the visibility both teams need

E-billing has done important work for legal teams. It brought structure to invoice review, enforced rules, and helped catch charges that didn’t belong. Those controls still matter. But eBilling wasn’t built to help finance or legal understand how the work is developing while it’s happening.

It tells you whether a bill is correct. It doesn’t show the series of decisions that shaped the spend or whether the numbers are beginning to drift. For two teams trying to plan ahead, that leaves them without the information needed to stay in control.

Most of the activity that influences cost takes place long before an invoice appears. So when eBilling finally enters the picture, the financial story is already set. Legal updates forecasts using information that’s already behind the curve. Finance adjusts plans based on numbers that don’t reflect the current state of the work. Neither gets the visibility needed to guide the budget with confidence.

But the issue isn’t with the controls eBilling provides. It’s the timing. The data arrives at the point of payment, not at the point where decisions are made. That timing puts both teams on the defensive. Legal relies on scattered updates. Finance sees movements that weren’t visible early enough to address.

This is why predictability becomes so difficult. You can validate a bill accurately, but you can’t influence the outcome when the only reliable data shows up at the end. eBilling can’t surface the indicators that matter most to forecasting, such as:

• How fast costs are building
• Where the work is expanding
• How staffing changes affect pace and spend
• Which upcoming steps may increase activity
• Where the overall trajectory is heading

Without these signals, budgeting turns into a conversation about what already happened. Legal explains. Finance reconciles. Both teams work around a system that only reports once the work is finished.

E-billing protects accuracy. It does not provide live insight. And in today’s budgeting environment, those two things serve very different purposes.

How continuous visibility gives finance and legal a shared foundation for budget control

When finance and legal can see the work as it develops, budget control stops being an argument about authority. It becomes a shared system that both teams can rely on. Predictability improves. Conversations get clearer. And decisions are rooted in the same live information, not delayed fragments of data that each team has to interpret on its own.

This is where Apperio and PERSUIT make the biggest difference.

PERSUIT sets the year up properly

Most of the volatility in legal budgets starts at the beginning, when work is scoped and priced.
If the plan is vague, the budget will be vague.
If the assumptions are loose, the forecasts will be loose.

PERSUIT brings structure to the start by giving legal and finance:

• defined scopes
• clear phases
• pricing models tied to expected outcomes
• firm proposals they can compare on value (not hours)

Instead of building budgets on high-level estimates, teams finally anchor them in structured, comparable information from the firms doing the work. Finance sees how the work is set up. Legal starts with a plan they can stand behind. Everyone begins the year aligned.

Apperio carries that clarity forward

Once the work begins, everything depends on seeing what’s happening early, rather than when the invoice arrives.

This is where Apperio does what eBilling simply can’t: it shows the financial reality as it develops.

Live tracking gives both functions:

• current exposure
• burn rates tied to actual activity
• early signs when pace, scope, or staffing begin to change
• a forward view of how the work is likely to unfold

There’s no chasing for updates. No piecing together forecasts from incomplete information. No discovering movements at quarter end that should have been visible weeks earlier.

Legal can explain the trajectory with evidence.

Finance can plan around numbers that won’t suddenly jump.

Both sides speak to the same picture as the work progresses.

Why shared visibility settles the ‘who owns the budget?’ question

The budget only becomes a point of tension when finance and legal work from different information. One team sees numbers that move late. The other sees activity that never makes it into financial systems until the invoice arrives. Both believe they’re acting responsibly. Both believe they’re right. The disagreement is really about visibility.

Once both sides can see how the work is developing, the ownership question starts to fade. Finance no longer needs to take control to keep forecasts steady. Legal no longer needs to defend changes that were visible weeks earlier. The conversation moves from authority to alignment.

Structured engagement from PERSUIT and continuous monitoring from Apperio give both teams the same starting point and the same ongoing view. Budgets stop drifting because the inputs are grounded in current activity, not estimates or delayed data. Forecasts become steadier because the signals finance needs appear early enough to act on. And legal can explain movements with evidence rather than justification.

With continuous visibility and both teams seeing what’s happening as the work progresses, budget ownership stops being a debate. It becomes a coordinated process supported by one version of events.

See how Apperio and PERSUIT give finance and legal one version of the numbers to plan from. Book a demo.