The Challenge
Most invoices pass because nobody has time to challenge them.
55% of legal departments still handle bill review entirely in-house, 60% have no formal outside counsel guidelines, and where guidelines do exist, 87% report that enforcement is light (2025 In-House Connect survey). The guidelines are written. The review capacity to apply them is not there.
Meanwhile Am Law 100 rates rose 12.1% year over year. The cost of unreviewed invoices grows with every rate cycle. The cost of a structured review program is fixed.
Where bill review breaks down
Guidelines exist on paper but are not applied at invoice
First-level review consumes attorney time that should go to legal work
Disputed entries lack documentation, so savings get given back when firms push
Review volume spikes at quarter-end and depth quietly collapses
Findings never reach the firms, so the same violations recur every month
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From the practitioners
Rates keep rising. Predictability is the harder problem.
Joseph Tiano of Legal Decoder, Danish Butt of Swiftwater and Company, and Jeff Solomon on why the rate cycle is only half the story, and why a department that cannot predict its spend cannot govern it.
Rate increases compound quietly, so the same matter costs more every year without anyone deciding it should
Departments that cannot forecast spend end up negotiating after the invoice rather than before the work
Review is where prediction and reality meet, which is why enforcement has to be continuous rather than annual
Featuring Joseph Tiano (Legal Decoder), Danish Butt (Swiftwater and Company), and Jeff Solomon.
The Service
A complete bill review service does five things. Every week.
A service that delivers only the first two is invoice processing, not managed bill review.
Activity 01
Guideline enforcement
Every invoice checked against your billing guidelines, approved rates, and matter context before it reaches approval.
Activity 02
Line-item analysis
Task-level review of staffing, block billing, duplication, and whether the work billed matches the work the matter required.
Activity 03
Exception handling
Documented reductions that survive the firm's pushback, so savings identified are savings kept rather than savings negotiated away.
Activity 04
Vendor coaching
Findings fed back to the firms so the same violations stop arriving, which is what makes first-submission compliance improve over time.
Activity 05
Savings reporting
Reporting that shows what was found, what was recovered, which firms are improving, and where the next tranche of savings sits.
Figure: The five activities of a managed bill review service
Beyond First-Level Review
An invoice does not fail review because of one bad time entry.
Most of what goes wrong with outside counsel invoices happens before anyone reads a line item. The matter was never set up with a budget or an approver. A cross-border invoice arrived with tax fields your workflow does not know how to route. Accounts payable is holding a payment nobody in legal knows is stuck.
Because our practitioners also administer the eBilling platform, these sit inside the same engagement rather than falling between legal, tax, and finance.
Matter setup and budgets
Matters opened with the right owner, practice area, currency, budget, and approval chain from the start. Rate cards loaded and kept current so the platform can enforce what was actually agreed.
Why it matters: a matter with no budget and no approver cannot be reviewed against anything, so its invoices pass by default.
Non-US invoices, routed correctly
International firms bill in local currency with VAT, GST, and withholding lines attached. We route those invoices to the approvers and to the tax and finance owners your policy names, so the tax treatment is decided by the people who own it rather than guessed at by a reviewer.
Why it matters: cross-border invoices are where review programs quietly stall, and a stalled invoice is a firm relationship problem, not just a finance one.
Working with accounts payable
We work directly with your AP team on the handoff: approved invoices moving cleanly into the payment system, rejections explained rather than bounced silently, vendor records and payment terms matched, and the exceptions chased until they clear.
Why it matters: a review finding only becomes a saving once the corrected invoice is paid and the firm has been told why.
Scope is set with you. Where tax treatment, entity structure, or payment policy is involved, we coordinate and route. Your tax and finance owners decide.
Claims & Staff Counsel
Built for claims litigation and staff counsel programs too.
Insurance claims and staff counsel bill review carries its own requirements: high volume, defense-counsel guidelines, claims-system coordination, and reviewers who understand the sequence of litigation activity. Our practitioners deliver structured claims bill review within the same five-activity model.
High invoice volume
Review depth that holds at claims-program volumes rather than thinning out under load.
Defense-counsel guidelines
Enforcement against the defense billing guidelines your program already publishes.
Claims-system coordination
Invoice data reconciled with the claim record so spend ties back to the file it belongs to.
Litigation sequence literacy
Reviewers who know what a case should cost at each stage, and what does not belong there yet.
Proof
Run today, at scale, for a global legal department.
Swiftwater delivers full-portfolio first-level invoice review, end-to-end eBilling administration, matter setup with budget approvals, vendor onboarding, and dedicated reporting for a global legal department.
The program contributes materially to the client's 20% legal spend savings target. Monthly invoice rejections are down by hundreds since the engagement began, as vendor coaching reduces first-submission non-compliance.
Results vary by guideline maturity, prior review depth, and panel composition.
20%
Client legal spend savings target the program supports
3-7%
Typical net realized savings from managed review, from 5 to 10% surfaced
Hundreds
Fewer monthly invoice rejections since engagement start, a vendor coaching effect
Who Runs It
Named practitioners, accountable for the work.
You meet the people who will run your review program on the discovery call, and they stay on the engagement.
Jeannine Puello
Lead · Managed Services
Ran legal operations inside AT&T and Verizon. She has built and run the function, and that operating credibility is what carries a review program from guideline design through enforcement.
Danish Butt
Outside Counsel Optimization
20+ years advising Chief Legal Officers on engagement letters, billing guidelines, panel structure, and rate programs, the upstream terms that decide what review can enforce.
Hafid Karama
Reporting & Analytics
Builds the reporting layer that turns review findings into evidence: what was caught, what was recovered, and which firms are actually improving.
Engagement & Pricing
Start with a pilot. Scale on evidence.
Run the pilot on a subset of firms or a single practice area, and evaluate documented savings before broadening scope. Nothing about the program requires you to commit to the full portfolio on day one.
Step 01
Bounded pilot
A subset of firms or one practice area, reviewed under the full five-activity model, with documented findings you can audit.
Step 02
Pricing that fits procurement
Fixed fee, fixed FTE, or outcome-tied, scoped to invoice volume and program maturity, and matched to the model your procurement team prefers.
Step 03
Full-managed or co-managed
We run the review function end to end, or we run it alongside your team with your reviewers keeping the work they want to keep.
Also relevant
Managed Legal Operations Services
We run the function on an ongoing basis, under your governance.
Legal Spend Management
Outside counsel optimization, eBilling, guidelines, panels, and rate programs.
Enterprise Legal Management
The platform layer your review program runs inside, selected and implemented.
Common questions