Why We Started Custodia Advisory
Custodia Advisory | Private Equity | About Us | February 2026
Custodia Advisory was built on years of experience across private practice, in-house legal teams, and financial services — onshore and offshore. Across that time, one pattern repeated itself in almost every institution we worked with: a well-drafted Outside Counsel Guideline, agreed once, filed away, and never meaningfully revisited.
That pattern is the reason this firm exists.
Guidelines age. Billing practices don't stand still.
An OCG written three or four years ago reflects the business as it existed at the time — the firms instructed, the matter types anticipated, the fee structures considered standard. Billing practices evolve constantly. New service lines emerge. Offshore law firms and fiduciary providers expand into adjacent offerings. Vendors introduce new categories of disbursement. A guideline that doesn't evolve alongside that activity quietly stops covering large parts of what's actually being billed.
We've seen this happen consistently: an OCG that was airtight when drafted develops gaps simply through the passage of time — not because anyone failed to do their job, but because no one owns the task of revisiting it.
Why annual review matters
A guideline should be reviewed at least annually, with a specific eye on:
- New business lines or service offerings now being provided by your existing law firms, fiduciary providers, and other vendors
- Matter types or engagement structures that didn't exist, or weren't anticipated, when the guideline was last drafted
- Fee arrangements and rate structures that have shifted since the guideline was last benchmarked against the market
- Disbursement and third-party cost categories that have expanded beyond what the original guideline contemplated
Without this review cycle, the guideline doesn't fail all at once. It fails gradually, at the edges, in exactly the areas that haven't been revisited — which is precisely where billing drift tends to concentrate.
Review alone isn't enough — enforcement has to sit upstream
An airtight guideline still depends on where it's actually applied. The most effective point isn't after an invoice has already moved through to the deal team for approval — by then, the guideline is being used to justify a decision already half-made. The guideline needs to be enforced by procurement, at first review, before an invoice ever reaches the people who approve it on the assumption that it's already compliant.
That sequencing matters. It's the difference between a guideline that shapes what gets paid, and a guideline that simply documents, after the fact, what should have been caught earlier.
What this means in practice
This is the foundation of our work at Custodia Advisory: reviewing and updating Outside Counsel Guidelines so they reflect the business as it actually operates today, and building the procurement-level enforcement that ensures the guideline is doing real work — not sitting in a folder, revisited only when something has already gone wrong.
In the next post, we look more closely at why this enforcement gap opens up in the first place — what we call the last mile problem — before turning to the specific billing patterns it allows to slip through, and the other quiet cost leaks, like dormant entities, that deserve the same level of scrutiny.
Custodia Advisory — custodiaadvisory.com