Legal departments have long grappled with a paradox: while expected to be strategic business partners, they’re often stuck in the weeds of budgeting, billing, and outside counsel management. Well, until they found PERSUIT: a platform built not just to digitize these tasks, but to rethink them from the ground up.
While legal tech is abundant, PERSUIT caught our attention for its clear focus on enabling smarter, outcome-oriented decisions across the lifecycle of outside counsel engagement. As a private practice lawyer, I’m always intrigued to know how to provide the most value to in-house counsel, and this tool provides great perspective.
Founded with the belief that legal dollars should reflect business value and not only hours logged, PERSUIT is designed to help legal teams engage firms more strategically, implement value-based pricing models, and monitor performance throughout the matter lifecycle. The recent acquisition of Apperio, a spend management platform known for its real-time analytics, strengthens that mission with enhanced visibility into spend and billing data.
We recently had the opportunity to touch base with David Falstein, VP of Product at PERSUIT to understand more about the product, its evolution, and what lies ahead.
Moving from Gut Feel to Data-Driven Strategy
To understand how PERSUIT differentiates itself, let’s dig into a few areas where it brings notable value. PERSUIT brings together tools that unify scoping, pricing, firm selection, and spend management into a single platform.
It all begins with smart scoping: a feature that uses GenAI to generate tailored RFPs from a short prompt or uploaded file. The result is a consistent, structured draft that teams can edit and use to align expectations from day one.
Our first question to David was how his team designed their scoping tools to strike the right balance between speed and legal nuance, and whether they prioritized consistency over customization.
David: “Our scoping tools, including matter-specific templates, were designed to give legal teams speed without losing the nuance their matters require. Standardized categories create consistency across matters and firms, making proposals easy to compare, while flexible fields allow for the customization needed in complex cases.
Rather than choosing between consistency and customization, we aimed for balance, enough structure to drive efficiency and transparency, but with the adaptability to capture legal nuance and unique client needs.”
Visibility and Action in Real Time
The integration of Apperio into the PERSUIT ecosystem allows legal teams to view both billed and unbilled accrual data continuously, giving finance and legal a shared, real-time understanding of spend. Alerts can be triggered before budget thresholds are crossed, and AI-powered insights offer an early look at potential scope or staffing issues.
With legal departments under pressure to justify every dollar, we asked David if and how clients are using accrual data to influence ongoing matters, or if they are using data just to clean up after the fact.
David: “With Apperio, legal teams can automate accruals by pulling real-time data directly from their firms, eliminating manual submissions and delays. Spend visibility as work happens enables proactive cost tracking, while early WIP insights flag potential budget or scope deviations before they escalate. Because firms see the same data, many adjust behavior naturally (often without a conversation) driving efficiency, transparency, and control.”
Building Better Firm Relationships
One of PERSUIT’s most valuable contributions may be how it facilitates performance feedback. Through structured review tools, legal departments can track outcomes and experiences, not merely rates. Over time, this builds institutional knowledge about which firms best align with the team’s values and goals.
With this in mind, we asked David how clients are using performance data to rethink their panels, and whether he’s seen it shift firm relationships or pricing models.
According to David, “clients are increasingly using performance data to rethink their panels, moving beyond reputation or history to decisions grounded in measurable outcomes. This data highlights how firms perform on responsiveness, diversity, innovation, and pricing consistency, giving legal teams the confidence to reward high-performing firms with more work while reallocating away from underperformers.”
He added that “it’s also reshaping pricing models. With clear visibility into performance relative to cost, clients are moving toward more predictable, value-based fee arrangements and away from traditional hourly billing. The result is healthier client, firm relationships built on transparency and shared goals.”
An Expanding Platform for Evolving Teams
With more than $17B in proposals processed and thousands of firms actively using the platform, PERSUIT is scaling with its users. The Apperio acquisition reflects a broader product evolution, one that integrates everything from e-billing and rate reviews to real-time spend validation in a cohesive ecosystem.
This isn’t about comparing one platform to another as much as it is about highlighting how PERSUIT has created a set of tools that work particularly well together for teams looking to move beyond the traditional hourly model.
Now that PERSUIT has achieved significant expansion, we asked David whether he’s seeing PERSUIT change the way legal teams approach strategy, or if it still mostly used to solve tactical pain points.
David: “While many clients leverage PERSUIT to solve tactical pain points like streamlining RFPs or managing rates, the platform quickly becomes a strategic enabler. By providing clear, real-time data on cost and performance, PERSUIT not only helps legal teams refine firm selection and pricing models but also equips them with the evidence they need to tell a compelling narrative to their leadership.
Lawyers also leverage the strategies written by firms on PERSUIT to refine how they will approach each case before it begins, a benefit that has become particularly compelling for litigation teams. Instead of relying on anecdotes, they can now demonstrate the value, efficiency, and impact of their outside counsel decisions with data-backed insights.”
Where Legal Spend Becomes Strategic
PERSUIT doesn’t try to do everything, instead, it aims to bring meaningful structure to one of the most complex parts of legal operations: managing external counsel. For in-house teams ready to make more data-driven decisions about their legal spend, elevate law firm relationships, and transform legal into a value center, it offers a compelling foundation.
The vision here is to build the kind of infrastructure that supports legal teams as they evolve, at their own pace, and on their own terms.
If you’re focused on delivering value and visibility across legal operations, PERSUIT is a platform worth exploring.
