Coincidence? Legal Tech’s Costs Rising, Support Slowing and Risk Growing
Welcome to Legal Ops Briefs—inspired by the mot-r mindset, this blog series of 3-minute reads gives in-house Legal Ops quick, operational insights. Each post will explore the tech, trends, and tactics that boost operational effectiveness and ease legal team stress—without adding to the noise.
Legal tech isn’t getting more expensive, harder to support, and riskier by coincidence. Those outcomes are the predictable result of how much of the legal technology market is owned, financed, and governed—and what those ownership structures are designed to reward.
Legal Ops leaders are often told that rising costs are the price of innovation, slower support is a scaling challenge, and growing risk is simply part of operating in a complex digital environment. But taken together, these trends point to something more structural.
What many teams experience as vendor fatigue is not random deterioration. It’s the downstream effect of incentive models that prioritize extraction over outcomes, growth over durability, and exits over long-term customer success.
Why Legal Tech Costs Keep Rising After Implementation
Legal Ops teams rarely sign contracts expecting double-digit renewal increases a few years later. Yet escalating costs have become a near-universal experience. This isn’t because vendors suddenly become greedy. It’s because many legal tech companies operate under ownership models that require continuous revenue expansion within fixed time horizons.
Once initial growth slows, pressure shifts to existing customers:
Bundled features justify higher tiers
Core capabilities move behind paywalls
Multi-year renewals are pushed aggressively
In markets shaped by consolidation, customers often have fewer alternatives—and far less negotiating leverage—when renewal arrives. Rising legal tech costs aren’t a surprise. They’re how the math works.
Why Legal Tech Vendor Support Gets Worse Over Time
Support degradation is one of the earliest signals Legal Ops teams notice. Tickets that once took hours take days. Dedicated customer success managers disappear. Escalations stall. And explanations are vague.
This pattern isn’t about individual support teams failing. It’s about margin pressure. Under short-horizon ownership models, support is often treated as a cost center rather than a value driver. Consolidation, outsourcing, and headcount reductions improve near-term financial metrics—even as customer experience suffers. Slower support isn’t a temporary phase. It’s a rational response to incentives that reward efficiency over service.
When Legal Tech Vendor Incentives Create Third-Party Risk
Legal technology systems hold some of an organization’s most sensitive information:
Privileged communications
Litigation strategy
Employment and compliance data
Intellectual property
When cost optimization consistently outweighs operational safeguards, investment in security, resilience, and internal controls is often deprioritized. That’s when vendor fatigue crosses into something more serious. What begins as frustration becomes third-party risk—embedded inside systems legal teams depend on daily. For Legal Ops leaders, the internal question quietly shifts from “Is this tool frustrating?” to “Is this system still safe to rely on?”
Growing risk isn’t an accident. It’s a consequence of incentives that treat long-term protection as optional.
Vendor Fatigue Is a Symptom of Incentive Misalignment
Legal Ops leaders often describe vendor fatigue as exhaustion from managing too many tools, too much change, and too many stakeholders. But tool sprawl is only part of the story. Vendor fatigue reflects a deeper misalignment between what customers need—stability, predictability, reliable support—and what many vendors are incentivized to deliver under current ownership structures. When incentives shift, behavior follows. And customers feel the impact long before it’s openly acknowledged.
The Vendor Due-Diligence Question Legal Ops Teams Rarely Ask
Most vendor evaluations focus on features, demos, and roadmaps. Those inputs say little about how a vendor will behave once incentives change.
A more revealing question is simple: Who owns this company—and what are they optimizing for?
Ownership structure influences:
Pricing stability
Support investment
Security posture
Product durability
Legal Ops teams that evaluate vendor incentives—not just functionality—are better positioned to protect continuity, manage risk, and avoid unpleasant surprises years after implementation.
What an Incentive-Aligned Legal Tech Model Looks Like
At mot-r, these realities shaped how we chose to build the company. We deliberately opted out of venture capital and private equity funding to avoid the incentive structures that drive extraction cycles. Remaining founder-owned allows us to prioritize long-term product investment, pricing stability, and contractual protections that give customers control—not lock-in.
That alignment shows up in how we operate:
We start with a single high-volume workflow
We prove value before expanding scope
We eliminate coordination overhead instead of optimizing it
We measure success by customer outcomes, not growth metrics
It’s not the only way to build legal technology—but it is a way designed to reduce friction instead of creating it.
Legal Tech Failure Isn’t Inevitable—But It Is Predictable
Rising costs, slower support, and growing risk aren’t caused by resistant users or unrealistic expectations. They are the predictable outcome of incentive structures applied to a market with high switching costs and sensitive data. And incentives can be examined.
When Legal Ops leaders look beyond feature lists and ask harder questions about ownership, governance, and long-term alignment, they regain leverage—and clarity—over decisions that shape their teams for years.
Chime In. Be Heard.
Have you experienced rising legal tech costs, slower support, or growing risk that felt less like bad luck and more like a pattern? Your perspective matters. The signals you’ve learned to watch for can help other Legal Ops teams avoid the same traps. How do you evaluate vendor incentives today? What do you wish had been more transparent earlier in your journey? By sharing what you’ve seen, you’re not just adding a comment—you’re contributing insight that helps the broader Legal Ops community make better, more informed decisions.
mot-r is the next-generation Legal Ops Orchestration platform. As a trusted supplier to general counsel teams in financial services, healthcare, real estate, sports management (and more) it reduces overwork and elevates legal service quality of legal teams of all sizes. By pairing mot-r Q’s intelligent self-service intake and automated attestations with mot-r Op’s orchestrated workflows, dashboards, and granular reporting, the result is a powerful integrated platform that improves operational effectiveness, enhances client service, and helps prevent legal team burnout. Created by a team of enterprise software experts who have a passion for reducing the human cost of legal work, mot-r helps legal departments orchestrate their people, processes, and documents into a unified, high-performance legal ecosystem. When you're ready to modernize how your in-house team works, we're ready to help.
