Client case study · American-Asian global technology company
Swiftwater advised the legal leadership of an American-Asian global technology company on its operating model: roles, decision rights, governance, the roadmap, and the choice between centralized, regional, and hybrid delivery. Organizational change was absorbed into process and system as it happened, through every reorganization.
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What we bring
- 400+ years of combined experience across the practice.
- Legal operations teams built from the ground up at Fortune 500 companies.
- A 10% legal spend reduction target for our spend programs.
Industry context
0.50%
Total legal spend as a share of company revenue, averaged across all department sizes
48%
Share of legal spend going to outside counsel at companies with $1B to $5B in revenue
$1.8M
Median outside counsel spend across all reporting departments
$11.2M
Annual outside counsel spend floor for the top quartile of legal departments
Source: 2024 ACC Law Department Management Benchmarking Report. Figures are industry medians and averages, reproduced here for context. They are not Swiftwater client results.
Engagement
How a legal operations engagement works
01
Assess
A fixed-fee assessment of spend, technology, process, people and data, scoped to the department’s size.
02
Roadmap
A sequenced roadmap for what to fix first, built from your own baseline rather than benchmark reports.
03
Deliver
Named practitioners design and deliver the change: process, technology, spend programs and adoption.
04
Measure
Dashboards on spend, cycle time and volume, so legal can prove the value it delivers.
Common starting points
- The CFO has asked legal to control spend, and legal lacks the data to respond.
- A technology decision such as ELM, CLM or DMS is pending, and nobody owns it.
- A new GC or legal operations leader inherits a function that grew by accident.
Our Services
What a legal operations engagement covers.
Six services, drawn on as the roadmap requires.
01
Legal Ops Assessment & Roadmap
Where the function stands across spend, technology, process, people and data, and what to fix first.
02
Operating Model & Process Design
Intake, matter workflows, business self-service, playbooks and the governance that keeps them running.
03
Legal Technology Strategy & Implementation
Selection through go-live across ELM, CLM, DMS, e-signature and AI.
04
Outside counsel optimization, eBilling, guidelines, panels and rate programs.
05
Data, Reporting & Business Intelligence
Dashboards and reporting that let the GC answer the CFO, CEO and business leaders with numbers.
Who Runs It
Named practitioners, accountable for the work.
You meet the people who will do the work on the discovery call, and they stay on the engagement.
Jeannine Puello
Managed Services and Legal Ops Leader
Led legal operations inside AT&T and Verizon. She has built and run the function, and that operating credibility is what carries a program from design through enforcement.
Danish Butt
Managing Director
20+ years advising Chief Legal Officers, with earlier roles at Huron Consulting and Morae Global. Stood up legal operations and technology functions for enterprise legal departments, with delivery across the full ELM, CLM and IP platform landscape.
Gary Wheeler
CLM & AI Lead
Built contracting programs and legal operations teams inside Fortune 500 companies including Home Depot and Cox.
Frequently asked questions
What does a legal operations consulting engagement cost, and how is the assessment priced?
The assessment is a fixed-fee engagement scoped to the department’s size. Transformation and managed operations engagements are scoped from the roadmap the assessment produces, with fees confirmed on a discovery call before any commitment.
How long does a legal operations assessment take, and what do we get at the end?
An assessment typically takes 4 to 12 weeks, depending on the department’s size. You get a read of where the function stands across spend, technology, process, people and data, and a sequenced roadmap for what to fix first. The roadmap also sets out which engagement model it justifies: advisory, transformation or managed operations.
Does Swiftwater work with small legal departments or only Fortune 500?
Yes, both. Swiftwater’s professionals have built contract and legal operations functions for one-person law departments through global Fortune 500 legal teams. Small departments usually need sharper prioritization rather than smaller ambitions, and the assessment is designed to find the two or three moves that matter.
Which legal operations consulting services help reduce outside counsel spend most?
Spend and vendor programs: outside counsel optimization, eBilling with automated review, billing guideline enforcement, panels and rate programs. They start from a matter-level baseline of your own spend, and our spend programs target a 10% reduction. See our legal spend management practice.
Which legal operations consulting services focus on performance metrics and dashboards?
Data, reporting and business intelligence: standing dashboards on spend, cycle time and volume, so the GC can answer the CFO, CEO and business leaders with numbers. Every engagement ends with this measurement layer, which feeds the next roadmap.
What should a General Counsel look for in a legal operations consulting partner?
Practitioners who have run legal operations, not only advised on it, and a team that can implement what it recommends. Swiftwater’s practitioners ran legal operations inside enterprise legal departments, including AT&T and Verizon. The same team that writes the roadmap can implement the eBilling system, stand up the CLM and run the managed service afterward.
Does Swiftwater offer managed bill review as part of legal operations?
Yes. Managed bill review checks every outside counsel invoice against your guidelines, rates and matter context, inside the eBilling platform you already own. See our legal bill review services.
Talk to a practitioner about your legal operations.
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