Clifford Chance
More efficient processes reduce legal costs by approximately 50% and deliver outcomes more quickly
Our international banking client undertook the largest re-structure in its European history. With entities across 20 business lines and 25 jurisdictions, the due diligence challenge was highly complex.
Here is a look at how this came about and what processes were involved.
CASE STUDY | CONNECT, CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT, LEGAL PROJECT MANAGEMENT
The challenge
The traditional approach to due diligence would involve the collation, allocation, review and analysis of documents in several different languages. Each document would then have been reviewed by a specialist lawyer in the relevant country. They would have to document and return their findings to a central team for collation and reporting to our client. With thousands of documents to review, the complexity of the task was immense.
The solution
To make the process more efficient, Clifford Chance deployed the full suite of our Best Delivery programme. Starting with process analysis workshops to critically analyse every step in the traditional approach, the team planned a new approach. Our lawyers introduced several innovations. We appointed a Legal Project Manager to manage the process. We custom-built a data room solution, an online work space that made it far easier for people to collaborate. To drive down the cost of the review we deployed our low-cost delivery centre.
The Best Delivery approach involved our client submitting documents for review directly into the data room, carefully describing each one. This enabled us to notify the relevant lawyer in our network to begin work immediately, including the team in our low-cost delivery centre.
Instead of recording their analysis in a Word document, our lawyers and delivery teams completed an online questionnaire from within our cloud site. This allowed us to control the extent of the analysis our client needed and to record the analysis instantly. Draft reports were generated automatically and were then quickly reviewed by senior lawyers, who identified any issues to share with our client.
The result
Together, these improvements meant the Best Delivery approach cost around half the traditional approach and our client received the outcomes of the legal analysis far more quickly.
