The subpoena returns land in a fraud recovery matter. Three years of bank records, a stack of call detail records from two carriers, and corporate registry filings on a web of LLCs. The partner does what most firms do: sends it all to an outside investigations firm. Six weeks later, an invoice for $38,000 arrives, and the billing partner passes it through to the client at cost.
At cost. That part matters, and it is the part most firms never stop to question.
The billing rule that makes outsourced analysis a dead end
Under ABA Formal Opinion 93-379, when a firm hires a third party on a client’s behalf, that charge is a disbursement. The client is entitled to assume the number on the bill matches what the firm actually paid. Absent a specific agreement made in advance, the firm cannot add a surcharge. No margin, no markup, no revenue. The firm handled vendor selection, managed the engagement, absorbed the risk of a missed deadline, and earned exactly zero dollars on the work itself.
Worse, that $38,000 shows up on the client’s bill as a cost. Clients scrutinize costs. They negotiate them, they push back on them, and in a fee dispute, they are the first line items challenged. Outsourced analysis is not just margin-free for the firm. It is friction in the client relationship.
Professional time plays by a different rule
Now run the same matter a different way. The bank records, the CDRs, and the registry filings stay in-house. A litigation support analyst or paralegal loads them into a link analysis platform, builds the entity map, flags the transfers that route through the shell LLC, and constructs the timeline the partner will use at deposition.
That is not a disbursement. That is professional time, billed as fees at the timekeeper’s rate, the same way every other hour of casework is billed.
The Supreme Court settled the underlying principle decades ago. In Missouri v. Jenkins (1989), the Court held that paralegal and law clerk time is properly billed at prevailing market rates, not at the firm’s actual cost, and that those market-rate hours are recoverable in statutory fee awards. The Court’s reasoning is worth remembering: encouraging skilled non-attorney professionals to do work at lower rates than attorneys makes legal services more cost-effective for everyone. Richlin v. Chertoff (2008) reaffirmed the same principle under the Equal Access to Justice Act.
So the law does not merely permit firms to bill professional staff time for analytical work. The economics of it are the model the courts explicitly endorsed.
Your firm already ran this play once. If this sounds familiar, it should. It is exactly what happened with e-discovery.
Fifteen years ago, document review and data processing were vendor line items that firms passed through to clients, who resented them. Then firms started bringing the work inside. Litigation support went from an operational cost center to a business unit that bills hours, retains revenue that used to walk out the door to vendors, and gives clients more predictable pricing in the bargain. Firms that made the shift have documented tens of thousands of dollars in additional billed work on single matters, and some large firms built entire insourced service centers around it.
Discovery is the biggest lever there is. It accounts for the vast majority of litigation spend. Firms that captured even a slice of that work in-house changed their margins on every data-heavy matter.
Link analysis is the next slice, and it is sitting in the same place e-discovery sat in 2010: assumed to be too technical, too specialized, something only an outside shop with former agents on the letterhead can do.
The work is more teachable than the vendors want you to think
Here is what the outside investigations firm actually does with your subpoena returns. They normalize the carrier formats. They match subscriber records to names. They build a timeline of who called whom, when, and how the pattern changed. They trace transfers across accounts and match registry filings to the people behind the entities. Then they hand you a chart.
None of that requires a badge. It requires the data your firm has already obtained through discovery and subpoena power, software built to map relationships across the data, and a trained analyst. The partner who knows the case theory is better positioned to direct that analysis than any vendor working from a two-page engagement memo. The associate or analyst who builds the map develops command of the record that pays off at deposition and trial, which is its own return no invoice captures.
Some work should still go outside: testifying experts, forensic collection where chain of custody will be contested, and matters where you need an independent opinion rather than work product. An honest in-house model keeps those boundaries. Everything else—the recurring analytical work at the center of white-collar, trade secrets, fraud recovery, and insurance fraud matters—is billable casework your firm is currently giving away.
The math on one matter
Take that $38,000 vendor invoice. Passed through, the firm earns nothing, and the client absorbs a cost.
In-house, the same analysis might be 60 hours of analyst and associate work. Billed at market rates, that is revenue on work the firm controls, on a timeline the firm controls, producing work product the trial team actually shaped. The client often pays less in total than the vendor’s invoice; the firm keeps the difference rather than forwarding it, and in fee-shifting cases, those hours are recoverable. That is the rare case where the firm’s margin and the client’s bill move in the same direction.
The requirements are the ones you would expect: rates spelled out in the engagement letter, time that reflects work actually performed, and reasonableness throughout. The same rules that govern every other hour your firm bills.
Before the subpoena returns go out the door to a vendor, ask one question: is there anything in this analysis our own people could not do with the right tool? For most link analysis, the honest answer is no. The only thing the vendor has that your firm does not is software.
SentVi maps relationships from call records, financial data, and corporate filings, and it was built for exactly this work.
Find the Poisoned Apple at SentVi.
Free trials are available to test the software on a real matter. Start at https://sentvi.com/link-analysis-book-a-demo/
