There are plenty of reasons for law firm and legal departments to use legal industry-specific request for proposal (RFP) tools—but whether they actually are using those solutions or not remains something of a question mark.

While automated tools can help organizations expedite certain facets of the RFP process, allowing them to analyze, compare and respond to proposal requests at a faster clip, it remains uncertain whether corporate legal departments are actively engaging with RFPs at all or simply relying on a time-tested list of favored law providers.

Natham Cemenska, director of legal operations and industry insights at Wolters Kluwer's ELM Solutions, indicated that he hasn't seen too many legal-focused RFP providers arise over the last few years. "There's starting to be some more. There's not too many. There's never going to be too many because legal is like less than 1% of the U.S. economy. … There's just not much profit to be had in the legal industry," he said.

One reason may be that corporate attorneys—much like their law firm brethren—are creatures of habit. Cemenska said corporate legal departments often have a list of preferred firms or providers they turn to for a given matter. RFPs are used as negotiating leverage to keep costs down rather than as an urgent attempt to find legal help.

"Corporate legal departments don't really do RFPs all that often," Cemenska said.

However, that reluctance could have as much to do with some of the pre-existing RFP solutions on the table as it does with corporate attorney habits. Josh Kalmus, VP of sales at the outside counsel engagement platform Persuit, pointed out that many of the general RFP solutions on the market are geared towards procurement experts—which the average lawyer is not.

"They are quite complex tools. They have lots of checkboxes and elements, so if you try to get an attorney into one of those tools, they'll never adopt it. That's why RFP in legal has traditionally been carved out and legal has been left to its own devices," Kalmus said.

When attorneys did engage with the RFP process, they were mostly using spreadsheets and email, a habit that legal-focused providers like Persuit are trying to break through making the RFP process seems less intimidating. The Persuit platform, for example, was developed so that users could dive-in after watching a 40-minute training video and make use of various templates and pricing models broken down by practice area.

But making RFP tools easier to use is only half the battle. Ray Meiring, CEO of the sales enablement and proposal management platform Qorus, believes the market for legal-focused RFP products is growing, in part due to the rising levels of competition among global and even smaller-sized law firms. For law firms, the value of using an RFP tool built with legal in mind is likely tied directly to pitching new corporate clients.

Where generic RFP tools can help users automatically generate responses to an incoming proposal request, law firms' services are distinct from, say, an organization focused on sales or marketing and thus may require a more tailored answer.

"It's very much around representing your best experience in your law firm, making sure that you are highlighting the best attorneys that you have, representing your experience, your case studies and résumé in a very attractive way inside of an RFP response. That's where it differentiates from the more generic RFP responses that you might see," Meiring said.

With more legal-friendly RFP solutions on the table, could the economic fallout from COVID-19 drive more legal departments to leverage those tools in an effort to cut costs? Cemenska thinks it's possible, but that companies may also be reluctant to sink resources into new products right now.

"I'm not sure it's time to buy an RFP solution if it's time to save money like yesterday," Cemenska said.