How Docker Controls Outside Counsel Spend with a Lean Legal Team

As Docker expanded, its legal team encountered a familiar inflection point: processes that once worked started to show their limits. Invoice review, accrual collection, and spend reporting, previously managed through emails and spreadsheets, began consuming time without delivering the clarity the team needed.

Rather than absorb that growing administrative load or add headcount, Head of Legal Joel Benavides and legal operations lead Becca Soch saw an opportunity to modernize how the team operated and bring sharper visibility to outside counsel spend.

A Flexible Legal Operating Model

Docker’s lean legal function supports a global technology business. Joel leads the team, while Becca oversees the operational backbone across contracts, data management, and outside counsel engagement. Together, they’ve built a model that extends the team’s capacity through a combination of external partners and technology.

As Joel describes it, the approach is about matching the right resource to the work:

• Alternative legal service providers handle high-volume commercial transactions on a fixed-fee basis
• Specialized law firms support corporate, employment, and IP matters that require regional expertise
• Legal technology automates routine work and expands the team’s capacity to focus on higher-value initiatives

The structure enables Docker’s legal team to support business needs in a flexible and scalable manner. But with outside counsel playing a central role, maintaining visibility and predictability around spend became essential to keeping the model efficient.

When Manual Processes Can’t Keep Up

As the business grew, outside counsel spend increased alongside it. While the team could see total spend, answering more detailed questions—where costs were concentrated, which matters were driving them, and which outside counsel work was driving value for the business—meant piecing together information across inboxes and spreadsheets.

“We could see our overall spend, but breaking it down by matter or category wasn’t easy,” Becca explains. “We wanted a clearer view so we could plan more effectively.”

Invoice handling added to the challenge. With invoices arriving by email and routed manually, in-depth reviews of charges were time-consuming, and even a small number of missed approvals could trigger hours of reconciliation.

Recognizing the need for clearer visibility and a more scalable approach, Joel and Becca looked for a system that could centralize invoices and provide reliable data for planning.

Brightflag enabled that shift by flagging invoice issues early through AI-supported review and reducing manual effort around accruals and reporting through its intuitive interface. With less time spent coordinating financial data, the team could focus on managing spend more intentionally.

Redesigning Spend Management

Implementing Brightflag gave the legal team an opportunity to strengthen how they worked with both finance and their law firms, creating new ground rules to improve collaboration and outcomes.

Resetting billing expectations

Becca worked with Brightflag’s Customer Success team to codify Docker’s billing expectations. They plugged Docker’s agreed law firm discounts and rates, plus their preferred resourcing rules and late billing guidelines, directly into the system.

This wasn’t just about cleaner invoices. Becca used it as an opportunity to reset expectations with their outside counsel partners on how Docker wanted to be billed. 

Joel sees the transparency they built as a positive force in firm relationships. “It’s not confrontational,” he says. “It helps us work together more smoothly. Firms get paid faster, and we spend less time reconciling.”

Using AI to focus review time

With expectations clearly defined, Brightflag AI became the mechanism that applied them. Instead of manually scanning long invoices for patterns like excessive charges for internal conferences or basic research, Becca could rely on automated flags to surface what needed attention.

“It can really take a long time to go through and manually look at each charge on an invoice.” said Becca “Now, I can just focus on the things that matter, and make the recommended adjustments. We’ve been able to save a good amount of money using those.”

Automating accruals and reporting

For finance, the impact was immediate. Accrual requests are now automated, firms submit directly in the system, and reports are delivered as soon as accruals close, eliminating monthly email follow-ups and strengthening alignment with the CFO.

From Visibility to Control

Six months in, Docker’s legal team has reduced manual tracking, strengthened collaboration with finance, and improved spend control.

“We were able to achieve immediate savings through better discount tracking and billing rules, while improving billing timeliness and eliminating manual accruals collection and reporting”, said Becca.

“What I love,” said Joel, “is that all of this helps us strengthen our relationships with our outside counsel. We have aligned expectations, which makes the billing process smoother and ensures they get paid timely.” 

Next, Becca is preparing to introduce per-matter budgets for the coming fiscal year, adding another layer of predictability.

Docker’s experience shows that controlling outside counsel spend isn’t about adding layers of manual review or slowing teams down. With the right structure and technology in place, legal teams can spend less time reconciling data and more time making informed decisions that support the business as it scales.