How to Leverage Firm Reviews for Better Outside Counsel Decisions
Internal reviews give in-house teams a consistent, structured way to capture feedback on how a law firm performs — not just during the proposal stage, but throughout the entire engagement. They replace ad-hoc, subjective comments with a unified method of evaluating quality, collaboration, value for money, and diversity commitments.
In this article, you’ll learn how to use Firm Reviews on PERSUIT to create a consistent, structured, and insight-driven way of evaluating your outside counsel.
You’ll understand:
- Why Firm Reviews matter and how they replace ad-hoc feedback with a consistent, repeatable process.
- An overview of each review category and the types of questions they cover.
- Best practices for creating effective review cycles that improve feedback quality and firm accountability.
- How to apply review data to inform firm selection, pricing, and long-term strategy.
By implementing Firm Reviews into your workflow, you’ll strengthen outside counsel relationships, increase transparency, and support more confident and data-driven decision-making.
We hear consistently that teams have no centralized way to gather firm feedback, making it difficult to understand whether a firm delivered what they promised, whether the engagement was good value for the investment, and whether the firm should continue receiving work or remain on the panel.
Firm Reviews, a new enhancement from PERSUIT, fills this gap by providing a simple, repeatable, and insight-driven process that can support matter closeout, recurring assessments, annual firm reviews, and more. To get the most value from this process, it helps to understand how each review is structured, the types of questions you may want to ask of your team, and how their responses might be used to inform outside counsel decisions moving forward.
Structuring Your Review: Review Categories
PERSUIT’s Firm Reviews are structured around four core categories that reflect key dimensions of client–firm performance:
- Quality, Expertise, and Outcomes
- Business Understanding and Collaboration
- Cost and Value Alignment
- Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion
These categories are fixed to ensure consistent, comparable analysis across engagements. Your PERSUIT Program Manager can include all categories or select only those most relevant to your business. Each category’s questions are fully customizable. Not sure where to begin? Explore the example questions provided below.
1. Quality, Expertise, and Outcomes
Evaluates the firm’s legal execution, strategic judgment, and the quality of delivered outcomes.
Example Questions
- Did the firm demonstrate the appropriate level of expertise for this matter?
- Was the advice technically accurate, practical, and aligned to your risk posture?
- Were deliverables clear, timely, and actionable?
- Did the matter outcomes meet your expectations?
- Was the matter staffed appropriately with the right seniority mix?
How to Use Your Team’s Feedback
- Annual firm performance reviews: combine feedback from across the year to evaluate overall firm performance, spot trends, and identify areas to strengthen before annual review discussions.
- Panel refresh assessments: use collective team input to determine which firms should stay on your panel, which need improvement, and where new options may be needed—ensuring decisions are based on real performance, not anecdotes.
- Post-deal or post-litigation retros: review how effectively a firm supported you during significant or complex matters. Apply these insights when selecting firms for future deals or cases.
- General firm feedback over time: track how a firm’s performance changes across engagements to understand whether they’re improving, holding steady, or declining—informing long-term relationship and budget decisions.
2. Business Understanding and Collaboration
Measures how well the firm understood the business context and worked with internal teams.
Example Questions
- Did the firm understand our business objectives and constraints?
- Was communication clear, proactive, and appropriately frequent?
- Did the firm adapt to our internal processes and expectations?
- Did they collaborate effectively with internal stakeholders (finance, procurement, business units)?
- Was the relationship managed transparently and professionally?
How to Use Your Team’s Feedback
- Quarterly business reviews (QBRs): use recent feedback to ground QBR discussions in real performance data, highlight progress, and identify where adjustments are needed for the next quarter.
- Annual relationship reviews: bring together feedback from across the year to assess the overall strength of the relationship, celebrate wins, and address recurring challenges with the firm.
- Evaluating cross-matter partnership performance: review feedback from multiple matters to understand how consistently a firm delivers. This helps determine whether they are a reliable long-term partner across different work types.
- Considering expansion of work to a particular firm: use team insights to evaluate whether a firm has demonstrated the quality, collaboration, and value needed to take on additional or more complex work.
3. Cost and Value Alignment
Evaluates whether the engagement delivered value relative to cost and whether the firm stayed accountable to pricing commitments.
Example Questions
- Did the firm deliver what they said they would at the agreed price?
- Was this matter good value for money overall?
- Were scope, budget, and assumptions clear and updated when needed?
- Did the firm proactively manage costs and avoid surprises?
- Was the pricing competitive compared to other similar matters?
How to Use Your Team’s Feedback
- Matter closeout reviews: leverage cost-related feedback to confirm whether the firm delivered value for money and honored pricing expectations, helping guide future matter assignments.
- Panel scoring and ranking: use team input on cost and value to create fair, data-driven comparisons across firms, supporting more objective panel decisions.
- Budget planning cycles: incorporate feedback on cost management and pricing reliability to forecast spend more accurately
- Negotiating AFAs or rate cards: rely on team experience to understand where firms consistently meet—or miss—pricing commitments
4. Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion
Evaluates the firm’s demonstrated commitment to D&I through staffing, leadership, and real action.
Example Questions
- Did the firm provide inclusive staffing on the matter team?
- Did the firm demonstrate accountability to our D&I expectations?
- Were diverse perspectives represented in interactions and decision-making?
- Does the senior team working with us reflect meaningful diversity?
- Did the firm show progress against its stated D&I commitments?
How to Use Your Team’s Feedback
- Annual relationship reviews: use diversity-related feedback to assess whether a firm’s staffing and commitments align with your organization’s expectations over the course of the year.
- Panel selection and renewal: apply insights on a firm’s diversity performance to inform which firms should join or remain on your panel.
- Vendor diversity audits: leverage detailed feedback to support diversity reporting, demonstrating how firms are performing against your diversity standards.
- High-visibility matters where team composition matters: use feedback to confirm whether firms are providing appropriately diverse teams for prominent or sensitive matters, helping you select partners who reflect your priorities.
Best Practices for Using Firm Reviews
Getting Started
Program Managers can configure multiple questions within each question category, depending on the depth of feedback needed. However, we strongly recommend keeping question sets short and focused to avoid overloading reviewers.
A practical guideline:
- 1–2 questions per category: enough structure to gather meaningful feedback
- Avoid large surveys: long lists reduce completion rates and the quality of responses
1. Use Reviews as a Relationship Tool, Not Just a Scorecard
Turn reviews— sourced from internal stakeholders—into constructive conversations with firms to highlight strengths and identify opportunities for improvement.
2. Encourage Multiple Reviewers and a Regular Review Cadence
Different matter owners and stakeholders (at different stages of the engagement) bring different perspectives — producing a fairer, richer view of performance.
3. The Team can review a Firm multiple times
Colleagues can review the same firm multiple times - providing clear feedback over time on the relationship.
4. Be Specific and Evidence-Based
Encourage examples from your team— even one sentence helps.
5. Build a Regular Cadence
Request reviews as part of matter closeout, quarterly check-ins, or annual firm evaluations to build a strong anecdotal database.
6. Use the Data to Inform Decisions
Insights can guide panel decisions, pricing discussions, allocation of future work, and internal data visibility.
Firm Reviews on PERSUIT turn feedback into a strategic asset—giving legal teams a clear, consistent view of how outside counsel actually perform over time. By replacing informal, anecdotal input with structured, comparable insights, you can strengthen firm relationships, reinforce accountability, and make smarter decisions about panel composition, pricing, and future work allocation. Whether used at matter closeout or as part of an ongoing review cadence, Firm Reviews help ensure your outside counsel strategy is grounded in real experience, not guesswork.
Interested in learning more about how Reviews work? Check out the following articles in our Knowledge Library:
