The two hottest litigation areas these days are wage-and-hour and regulatory/compliance cases, according to legal data expert Craig Raeburn and general counsel Robert Ingato. But that isn’t translating into more legal spending by corporate law departments.

Raeburn, vice president of legal analytics at TyMetrix Inc., said that’s the trend showing up in the company’s massive database. He explained that the database, called LegalVIEW, holds information from actual invoices from over 17,000 law firms worldwide, totaling $42 billion in legal expenses.

And what the data show is that from 2010 through 2012, regulatory/compliance litigation more than doubled in terms of corporate legal spend, while employment cases nearly doubled.

Ingato, general counsel at CIT Group Inc., a Fortune 500 bank holding company, said the increase makes sense.

“There’s an oversupply of lawyers in the marketplace . . . and an incredible volume of new regulations and whistleblower activity all over the place,” he noted. “On top of that are the very active [state] attorneys general who are much more activist.”

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