Is electronic invoicing for law departments a $2 billion market?

Deep within a Metropolitan Corporate Counsel interview of Eric Elfman, the founder and CEO of DataCert (Sept. 2005 at 33) , a sentence caught my eye. Elfman’s company, founded in 1998 – the primeval days of e-billing, has more than 70 law departments using its electronic invoice management software.

“We’ve also been responsible for creating a market potential of approximately $2 billion where virtually none existed before.”

I have seen figures estimating that US corporations spend $100 billion a year on outside counsel so the market potential referred to would be about 2 percent of that amount, which presumably could go to e-billing vendors. That suggests they charge, on average, 2 percent of the invoice amount for their services of gathering, analyzing, reporting, and tracking outside counsel bills.