Count the software your firm pays for. Not the ones IT manages, all of them, including the two a practice group expensed to a partner card and the one marketing signed up for in 2023.
In a firm of a hundred and fifty people we would expect the list to run past forty. The partners who commissioned them are often surprised by half.
The interesting part is not the total. It is what the list tells you about how decisions get made.
The real cost is not the licence
The licence fee is the visible number and usually the smaller one. Three costs sit behind it.
Unused seats. Firms buy per-user and forget to reclaim. Departures, secondments, the pilot group that became four people instead of forty. It is common to find twenty per cent of paid seats attached to nobody.
Overlap. Two systems that both store client documents, three that send an e-signature, four that hold a version of the client list. Each was bought to solve a real problem. Together they mean nobody trusts any single one.
Adoption drag. The tool that is used properly by one team and worked around by three. That is the expensive one, and it does not show up in any spend report, because the cost is in fee-earner minutes rather than in dollars.
A firm that sells hours has a direct line between adoption drag and margin. Fifteen minutes a day of reconciling two systems, across eighty fee earners, is a meaningful fraction of a partner's annual billings, spent on nothing.
Why it accumulates in professional services specifically
The mechanism is structural rather than careless.
Decisions get made by a managing partner between client commitments, on the recommendation of whoever feels most strongly, usually in response to something urgent. There is rarely a standing owner of the technology agenda, so nothing gets retired when its replacement arrives, and nobody carries a decision from partner-meeting approval through to firm-wide adoption.
That last gap is the one that matters. Approval is not adoption. A tool that half the firm uses is worse than either using it or not, because now you have two sources of truth and a reconciliation habit.
What to do about it, in order
Assemble the actual list. Contracts, the general ledger, and the expense reports. Not the list IT maintains, which by definition excludes the tools nobody told IT about.
Map it to how the firm actually works. Intake, matter management, documents, time and billing, client communication, knowledge. One system per function, and where there are two, decide.
Look at the renewal dates before the features. Consolidation only happens at renewal. Knowing that three overlapping contracts renew in the same quarter is what makes a decision possible; discovering it a month after two auto-renewed is what makes it wait a year.
Fund the adoption, not just the licence. The budget line that gets cut first is training, and it is the one that determines whether the spend returns anything.
The number that changes the conversation
When we run this for a firm the finding that lands is rarely "you are overspending." It is "you are paying for four systems to do one job and none of them is done well," and the remedy pays for itself in adoption before it pays for itself in licences.