The Challenge: A manufacturing business was in the midst of enterprise transformation. With over 1,600 employees around the world, a commodities business, a consumer products division, and $3B in revenue, its legal department consisted of two lawyers. To keep pace and better embed the legal function within the business, the General Counsel asked that we build out legal operations capabilities.
The Solution: In response, we first wanted to understand the organization’s value-chain, beginning with order intake and ending with product delivery and payment. We partnered across all relevant departments and led process mapping exercises to understand and depict the people, processes, and information systems used in the current state. In doing so, we revealed that transformation efforts had created knowledge silos throughout the organization.
To address that problem, we created a comprehensive workflow schematic that depicted all processes and process owners throughout the value-chain. That tool supported improvement discussions throughout the organization. The schematic also revealed gaps in legal service, that the business often entered into commercial contracts without legal department review, and opportunities for the legal department to create self-service solutions for the business. Accordingly, we created forms and templates for business owners, implemented contract training for sales and supply chain, and created an automated, new vendor intake system for procurement.
The process also revealed that the legal department’s matter management processes were bespoke and disjointed. We partnered with IT to design and implement a customized matter management system to track matter owners, matter status, and important metrics like matter cycle time and volume. Importantly, both the intake system and matter management system leveraged existing enterprise software with no additional licensing fees to the company.
The Results: As a result, the legal department embedded more effectively within the business and became a true strategic partner for business stakeholders. Process mapping gave the legal department better line of sight into the company’s existing contractual relationships. It also led to formal contracting standards and workflows for the business going forward. Further, the matter management system gave the General Counsel clear visibility to legal department resource workloads and a mechanism to monitor business stakeholders’ adherence to formal contracting workflows. All of this improved the legal department’s ability to better manage the company’s financial and operational risk.