Spend Management

Panel management software helps corporate legal departments manage the group of outside law firms retained to represent a given client, known as that client's panel. These solutions benchmark firm performance against peers and against the department's own criteria, track compliance with panel requirements, and support the selection process, including RFPs, rate comparisons, and alternative fee structures, when new firms are being considered. Legal departments use this ongoing oversight to decide whether to add or remove firms and to hold panel firms to defined standards in areas such as diversity and inclusion, technology adoption, or pricing discipline as a condition of retaining their position. Many platforms integrate with eBilling systems to connect firm selection to actual spend and historical rate data, giving legal operations teams a fuller picture when making panel decisions. Generative AI is increasingly used to recommend best-fit firms from matter intake data and past performance, draft RFPs automatically from matter details, and surface differences across firm proposals to speed decision making. Panel management functionality frequently overlaps with RFP and outside counsel sourcing solutions, so a platform's panel-specific depth is worth confirming rather than assuming from RFP capability alon