Ask a general counsel how much outside law firms are increasing their hourly rates, and you're unlikely to be told a single percentage. After all, it's hard to generalize if one firm's hike is 2%, a second's is 14% and a third's is 22%.

The scattershot nature of those increases, and the difficulty in pinning down what's causing some of the variations, long have frustrated legal chiefs, though they're most upset about the larger, long-term trend of outside counsel rates rapidly rising.