The Challenge
Outside counsel costs erode margin, frustrate CFOs, and resist every internal attempt at reduction.
Rate negotiations happen in isolation. Invoice review is manual and inconsistent. Spend data lives in spreadsheets or inaccessible systems. The problem isn't lack of effort. It's lack of infrastructure.
Legal departments know the spend is higher than it should be. What they lack is the visibility to prove it, the tools to challenge it, and the process to sustain the savings once found. That is the gap Swiftwater closes.
Where outside counsel spend goes wrong
Rate negotiations managed by relationship, not data
Invoice review is manual, slow, and inconsistent across matters
No single system of record for spend data across all outside firms
Outside counsel guidelines exist on paper but aren't enforced at invoice
Vendor concentration unmanaged, premium firms used for commodity work
Our Approach
Three phases. One outcome: less spend, sustained.
01
Spend Diagnostic
We analyze your current outside counsel spend, invoice patterns, rate structures, and vendor concentration. You get a clear baseline with savings opportunities identified, before any system is touched.
02
Implementation
We implement eBilling and matter management, typically on the Onit platform (and other market leading platforms), and deploy outside counsel guidelines, vendor management protocols, and structured bill review processes. The infrastructure that makes savings stick.
03
Optimize / Managed Services
We either hand off a fully operational system or continue as your ongoing managed services partner, running spend oversight, vendor reviews, and continuous improvement so results compound over time.
What this covers
• Outside counsel guidelines development
• eBilling system selection & implementation
• Matter management implementation
• Legal vendor management
• Bill review process design
• Rate benchmarking & negotiation support
• Spend analytics & dashboards
• AI-powered invoice analysis (LegalDecoder)
Practitioner Spotlight
Our team at Swiftwater includes experts who have led legal operations, legal technology, and outside counsel programs at scale across enterprise legal departments. When persistent cost pressure on legal spend meets growing legal demand, that combination of operating experience and implementation discipline is what your department draws on.
Jeannine Puello led legal operations at AT&T and Verizon, two of America’s most operationally complex enterprise environments. She has built and run the function, not just consulted on it, and that operational credibility is what carries an outside counsel program from design through enforcement.
Danish Butt has helped legal departments optimize their outside counsel spend by working through the relationships, billing rates, engagement letters, and preferred provider panels that sit behind it. His delivery experience spans the full range of enterprise legal management platforms (Onit, Mitratech, Prokurio, Anaqua, Wolters Kluwer, LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters, Dilitrust, and others), which means every engagement is grounded in implementation reality rather than a single-vendor perspective.
Jeannine Puello
Legal Operations Leader
Legal Operations • Managed Services • Vendor Management • Enterprise Delivery
Danish Butt
Managing Director
Legal Operations • Legal Technology • Outside Counsel Spend Optimization • Business Strategy • Delivery Model • ELM • eBilling
On every engagement, our team works alongside business intelligence specialists to build a spend analytics layer and, where appropriate, integrates LegalDecoder or other proprietary tools for AI-powered invoice analysis and dashboarding.
Services Highlight
The Outside Counsel Optimization Program
A structured three-phase engagement that takes legal departments from spend opacity to systematic control. Phase 1 identifies what you're overspending and where. Phase 2 builds the systems and processes to enforce compliance and capture savings. Phase 3 sustains and compounds those savings over time.
Delivered in partnership with LegalDecoder for AI-powered invoice analysis, and typically implemented on the Onit eBilling platform (and other market leading platforms).
Transform Your Delivery
Preferred Provider Program
For legal departments ready to take vendor management further. Following the Spend Diagnostic, Swiftwater designs and implements a formal preferred provider panel, rationalizing your legal vendor base, establishing selection criteria, and managing the program on an ongoing basis. Three phases: Spend Diagnostic, developing and rationalizing your provider panel, and ongoing program management.
Also relevant to this practice
Implement Legal Technology
→eBilling is typically implemented on Onit. Our Level 4 certified team runs both tracks.
Operate Your Legal Function
→Managed services for departments that want ongoing spend oversight without the internal overhead.
Manage Contracts at Scale
→CLM implementation, the contract infrastructure that supports outside counsel management.