Clifford Chance
A CC Dr@ft legal ecosystem
A global company in the internet sector was looking for a more efficient and structured way for their in-house legal team to collaborate between departments when preparing standardised legal documents. They were using multiple tools such as Word and Excel files, email and calls to gather instructions and draft documents. They believed they could do more efficiently by standardising and adding structure to the processes.
Here is a look at how this came about and what processes were involved.
CASE STUDY | CC DR@FT
The challenge
The requirements & initial solution
Our main contact, the Head of Legal for Corporate, was looking for a one stop digital solution. Like many other businesses, they debated whether to take on this challenge themselves or search for an existing technology solution that had the scope, support and reliability an international operation requires.
In the end, they decided to onboard CC Dr@ft rather than create a bespoke solution themselves because "Clifford Chance Applied Solutions were and still are the full-service package," combining "legal knowledge, coding, supportive collaboration style, and a robust document automation technology".
The quality, working style and outstanding service of the CC Dr@ft team made the decision easier. "Knowing you are in a safe pair of hands is invaluable". The team felt confident that Clifford Chance Applied Solutions (CCAS) would be there to support them long-term.
Onboarding new technology can be a daunting task. Customers need to demonstrate the value of technological solutions early on, both to the team and the wider business and prove return on investment. Together the customer and CCAS achieved these results quickly. Within four months CCAS built out 39 templates, including, among others, transfer deeds, set-off agreements and waiver agreements. An interactive questionnaire was structured in such a way that their finance team was empowered to answer the questions and legal only needed to check the answers given.
This achieved initial "time savings for the team for our pilot project were at 60% compared with the original processes".
In addition, they discovered some unexpected results of working with CCAS beyond the time savings. We changed the structure of the Corporate team's way of working, resulting in additional time savings and reduction of errors in data-driven tasks. Moreover, CC Dr@ft provided an opportunity for the team to embed compliance into the process; which was a surprising and powerful win.
The solution
The enhanced solutions
Building on this success they considered other ways in which CC Dr@ft could be utilised; the automation of data entry being the most obvious. Working together with we developed an integration to automate data into CC Dr@ft. At this stage the team recalculated the time savings for intercompany transactions and "increased the figure to 90%".
Growing more confident with the technology, the customer started seeing new opportunities for engaging CC Dr@ft in other areas of the business. As a result, cross-team communication improved, and the Corporate team have developed gate-keeping questionnaires to front load requests from other teams which further improved efficiency.
Iterating further, they looked for more ways to incorporate CC Dr@ft. Partnering with our parent company, Clifford Chance LLP, we worked towards building a legal eco-system.
The team challenged CCAS to create a faster and more modern approach to notarised documents. Mark Jan Arends, Partner and Notary at Clifford Chance LLP said "With this process our notarial team get involved at the right time, allowing us to focus on the tasks where we add value to the team."
In the latest development, Clifford Chance LLP's employment team drafted an employment agreement template which was embedded into CC Dr@ft, with the ambition to cover a multitude of jurisdictions.
The result
More than 25 lawyers and business users now use CC Dr@ft for their day to day work.
Overall the success of CC Dr@ft for the customer can be measured by the 90% time savings achieved on intercompany transactions, the clear and streamlined communication processes and the widescale use of CC Dr@ft across different disciplines. Today, a significant portion of documentation produced by the customer's inhouse team's global headquarters is now automated by CC Dr@ft.
The successful cooperation with CC Dr@ft and the measurable benefits it has produced has resulted in other parts of the business working with us. The team is keen to share the benefits of what we've achieved with the wider group: "The collaboration with CC Dr@ft has taken the department to a new level. The investment has already paid itself back many times over."
