Spend less. Defend more: Legal Spend Management

A structured, searchable register of every external legal engagement — built on tools you already use.

Most corporate legal departments operate without a reliable answer to a surprisingly basic question: how much are we actually spending on external counsel – and with whom?

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In larger organisations and corporate groups, this blind spot has real consequences:

  • No shared register of law firm relationships – individual legal teams engage their own firms, negotiate their own mandates, and manage their own budgets, often in parallel and without visibility across teams
  • No consolidated spend view – committed budgets and actual costs are tracked locally, if at all; group-level reporting requires manual consolidation
  • No shared knowledge – when a new matter arises, there is often no way to know whether a relevant firm has already been used elsewhere in the organisation, let alone how they performed

Why this matters strategically

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Legal spend – the balance between in-house capacity and external outsourcing – is one of the most important operational KPIs for any legal department. Yet it frequently cannot be reported reliably. This leaves General Counsel without the data they need to:

  • make the case for new hires or justify headcount decisions
  • benchmark external costs across teams or entities
  • demonstrate efficiency gains from past investments in in-house capacity
  • make informed sourcing decisions when selecting outside counsel

A custom-built matter and spend tracker – tailored to your department's needs

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Rather than deploying an off-the-shelf platform, we design and build a solution that fits your department's existing processes, data structures, and tooling. The result is a structured, searchable register of all external counsel engagements – lightweight to maintain, easy to adopt, and built on platforms your organisation already uses.
Depending on requirements, a solution of this kind typically includes some or all of the following:

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Matter and engagement tracking

  • A central register capturing each engagement with law firm, responsible partner, practice area, internal counsel, time period, and financial scope
  • Internal contact visibility per matter, so teams can identify who to consult before re-engaging a firm


Budget and spend management

  • Planned budgets and final costs logged at the opening and closing of each matter – providing a clean before/after view without ongoing administrative burden
  • Optional: mid-matter status updates tracking budget consumption, scope changes, or projected overruns in real time
  • Aggregated spend reporting for department leadership – by firm, practice area, team, or time period

Search and reporting

  • A dashboard with search and filter capabilities across practice area, law firm, partner, time period, and internal team
  • Optional: group-level consolidation for corporate groups, aggregating spend and data across subsidiaries while each entity retains its own operational view
Sernetz Schäfer

Key Benefits

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Central register of all external counsel engagements across teams and entities
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Consolidated view of planned budgets and actual legal spend
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Searchable by firm, partner, practice area, internal team, and time period
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Spend reporting for leadership – by entity, team, or period
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Optional real-time budget tracking and mid-matter status updates
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Optional group-level consolidation across subsidiaries
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A Custom-Built Legal Spend Management Solution – Tailored to Your Department

Taking It Further: Law Firm Performance Ratings

For departments that want to go beyond spend visibility, the solution can be extended with a structured law firm rating module. Rather than relying on informal word-of-mouth, this turns individual experiences with outside counsel into shared, searchable institutional knowledge.
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After a matter closes, the responsible in-house lawyer rates the engagement across defined categories – for example:These ratings accumulate over time and become visible to the wider legal team. When a colleague is considering engaging a firm for a similar matter, they can search prior engagements, see how the firm was rated, and identify the internal contact who worked with them – enabling an informed conversation before any mandate is issued.

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The result is a layer of qualitative intelligence that pure spend data cannot provide: not just how much was spent, but whether it was worth it.

  • Responsiveness – turnaround times and accessibility
  • Legal expertise – quality and depth of advice
  • Cost transparency – predictability of fees and adherence to budget
  • Collaboration – working style and communication

From scattered data to strategic clarity

The core value of this solution is deceptively simple: making visible what was previously invisible. For General Counsel and legal operations leaders, this shift from fragmented, informal tracking to structured, centralized data has a direct impact on how the department is managed and how it is perceived within the organization.

  • Data-driven decision making – with reliable spend data, legal leadership can move from intuition to evidence when making resourcing, sourcing, and budgeting decisions
  • Strategic positioning – legal spend data supports internal reporting and business cases: demonstrating cost efficiency, justifying headcount, or quantifying the return on in-house investments
  • Better sourcing decisions – knowing which firms have been used, at what cost, and with what outcome enables more deliberate outside counsel selection across the organization
  • Reduced coordination overhead – a shared register eliminates duplicate effort, ad-hoc email inquiries, and the risk of parallel engagements with the same firm going unnoticed
  • Scalable across the group – in multi-entity structures, the solution grows with the organization without requiring a separate system per entity

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Technology Note

This solution is custom-built to fit your organization's existing tooling and infrastructure. It is typically implemented on Microsoft Power Platform – including Power Apps, Power BI, and Dataverse – using licenses your organization likely already holds. Where preferred, the solution can equally be built on BRYTER or other platforms already in use.This approach avoids new software procurement, lengthy vendor onboarding, and cloud risk assessments – and keeps both implementation time and cost low.

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