Unexpected Expenses? Legal Tech Integrations Can Catch Firms Unprepared

As appeared on Law.com on September 4, 2025

The unexpected costs of data transfers between apps can impact law firm productivity in addition to hurting the bottom line.

As law firm tech stacks grow, vendor integrations are taking on increasing importance. The failure to manage integrations proactively could pose major threats to a firm’s bottom line and its productivity.

Law firms rely on a wide array of software—everything from practice management, timekeeping and matter management tools to document management systems and legal drafting platforms. When used effectively in concert, these tools offer important productivity improvements. However, many of these systems now rely on direct integrations between software applications to transfer data, which can impose unexpected costs on their end users.

Aderant CEO Chris Cartrett said some integrations have suffered from the transition away from on-premise software to cloud hosting, because end users have to rely on integrations between their cloud-based software systems to transfer data. These transfers are facilitated by requests between application programming interfaces (APIs), known as calls. Such data transfers can come at a cost, which, if not managed properly, can grow into a major expense for law firms.

“CIOs and law firms need to be paying attention to the data rules that are being put in place by their vendors,” Cartrett said. “What’s going to happen is you’re going to make these major investments into tools that are actually going to limit you, or cost you an arm and a leg as you continue to progress.”

These challenges are made even more acute by the amount of preparatory work that must be done before data from one app can be used by another in a cloud-based world.

“The amount of transformations and validations of that source data that has to happen before I can format it for a PUT call [used to replace or create a data set] is a lot of work on somebody’s part,” said Brad Sidwell, field CTO for legal markets at Intapp.

“As an integrator, somebody who integrates data, that’s our biggest challenge,” he continued. “We’ve got this data that we know how to get it, and now we know where we need to put it, but the complications of what we need to do to that data before we can call the put is a lot more complex than it ever was before.”

Where the Money Goes

Every API call imposes a marginal cost on the vendor, which has to pay for the computational resources needed to process a request. These costs will often be pushed on to the requesting party. To account for this, some systems that charge on a per-usage basis will incorporate the costs of running API calls on other apps into the pricing they offer users. Some contracts will also stipulate what constitutes fair usage, and what data access needs to be paid for.

However, not all requests will be covered by either of the vendors involved, with some costs passed on to the end user, at times in an opaque manner.

“We all have costs for integration, costs that we share, … and that’s about us making sure that our products and applications simply work well together,” Cartrett said. “When that moves to the law firm level, and it starts becoming about the tokens or the transactions … you’re starting to get into a situation that can truly create exponential costs for an individual firm.”

Unexpected costs are not solely a function of the number of API calls a platform makes, but are also a consequence of the amount of data to be transferred. “[It] doesn’t have to mean heavy employee use,” said Zach Abramowitz, founder of Killer Whale Strategies. “It can happen when each call processes lots of data or tokens, especially if you’re sending big internal documents.”

The need to manage integrations also increases the operating costs borne by vendors and their customers, requiring them to dedicate staff to the task of making systems work efficiently together.

“It’s hard for us to make sure that what [other vendors are] bringing out doesn’t break those predefined integrations,” Sidwell said. “We have to devote not only more resources, but consistently engaged and dedicated resources, to these conversations.”

Non-Financial Costs

In addition to getting hit with unexpected costs, a law firm’s performance can suffer if its vendors’ APIs don’t allow for easy integration with other tools. Poorly built APIs may struggle to handle requests from multiple third parties simultaneously, and any slowdown in one application will cascade across other systems that rely on the data it provides.

What’s more, some vendors restrict access to their APIs, which may mean a firm’s other vendors cannot integrate with them. This can lead to technical debt when a firm can’t take full advantage of the tech it procured.

Even if a firm finds itself paying more than it expected to use its tech stack, it cannot always extricate itself from the problem, as long-term contracts often compel them to stick with a provider.

Given the substantial friction often involved in changing providers, Abramowitz said it is easy to imagine firms “choosing to stick with the current provider rather than dealing with the time and cost of switching.”

Cartrett added it is particularly important for firms to get on top of the challenge now, as their use of generative artificial intelligence legal tech platforms is only likely to increase in the years to come, with their need to leverage their data along with it.

“It’s something for people to open their eyes and pay attention to, because, as the Harveys of the world and the Legoras of the world continue to expand within these law firms, this need for data that you’re going to use to be a lot more creative in a law firm is going to show itself,” Cartrett said.