You offered change and transformation, a way of doing it differently. Everyone else was pretty much offering the same old thing so you stood out from the start. Transformation was the biggest winner, through and through. We have confidence in the quality of people doing work, your timezone support, and speed. We are doing this on trust and everything we’ve seen has reinforced the decision. We have always had an internal running joke here that everything Radiant touches turns to gold. You are the opposite of us, and we know it! We want to change, and you are helping us do it.”

The Challenge

Headquartered in London, this client is one of the largest banking and financial services organisations  in the world, with an international network across Europe, the Asia-Pacific region, the Americas, the Middle East and Africa. Their team of more than 50 lawyers provides commercial legal support to a wide range of business functions.

Under pressure to improve their cost-value balance, and with an increasing focus on speed and efficient, future-proofed contracting processes, the legal team were looking to move the management of their procurement agreements from an existing outsourced solution provider. With an anticipated volume of >4,000 agreements per year, the scope of work included Call-Offs, Framework Agreements, Standalone Agreements, Risk Reviews and Amendment Agreements.

As well as ensuring a stable transition from the incumbent provider, the client was keen that a new Managed Legal Services solution would help to:

- tame the business processes, particularly around triage/intake, and streamline agreement templates,

- take the work off the legal team’s desks, ensuring knowledge is captured and escalations are judicious, and

- provide visibility of progress, and ongoing improvement of the end-to-end contracting process.

The Impact

The organisation's partnership with Radiant Law is delivering against key business requirements, including:

- Shorter, reasonable terms that allow agreements to be closed quickly and build good supplier relationships.

- Comprehensive playbooks to capture knowledge and positions and ensure consistency.

- Significant improvement in turnaround times, with more than 80% of matters now handled within half a day.

- The triage process is now clear, fast and efficient with a ‘one-stop shop’ centralised and standardised process and effective data gathering.

- Heatmaps, live dashboards and MI to see where contracts are being most negotiated, where demand is coming from, to assist with demand management, tracking performance against SLAs and progress against business KPIs.

- The in-house legal team is no longer pulled into the day-to-day detail and can trust the process.

- A scalable and flexible global solution that is continuously improving and can grow with the organisation's needs.

How We Did It

The organisation engaged Radiant Law to deliver a full-service managed legal service solution, handling their high volume, lower value procurement agreements across multiple timezones.

With a change in suppliers, a secure transition process was put in place early to ensure that business-as-usual support could be maintained for the business whilst the legal team felt in control and had full visibility of the handover priorities.

Rewriting templates to make them short, clear and reasonable was a key activity ahead of Radiant taking on the day-to-day management of matters. This exercise saw the client's paper optimised from 19 pages down to 10 pages, and their long-form agreement from 60 pages down to 6 pages. This has ensured that mark-up is minimised and, as a result, time to close is significantly faster.

Also during the set up phase Radiant took 20 of the client's agreements and ran a heatmapping exercise to analyse where clauses were being negotiated the most. This assisted the template streamlining and also enabled the fast-track creation of a playbook, capturing all client positions and escalation points, and ensuring that knowledge is held centrally and implemented at the point it is needed.

Automation was also put in place, using Docassemble to ensure that the agreements are right every time, and fast and simple to implement.

Putting in place a robust, standardised triage and intake process was central to the transformation of contracting support. Radiant rolled out a triage process with a streamlined form to capture clear instructions from the business that allow the team to accurately allocate matters to the right place and understand what is required for each deal. This also provides centralised background data that the client legal team can use to manage demand and ensure business compliance.

Live dashboards and regular reporting provide legal with key management information and full visibility of every deal Radiant handles, along with a broader picture of how the work is balanced and how the service is performing against SLAs and business KPIs.

Radiant is now delivering smooth and streamlined management of high volumes of contracts from instruction through drafting, negotiation and execution on behalf of the client across multiple timezones. A continuous improvement approach ensures that our support is highly-responsive and evolves with their changing needs.

To support strategic priorities our service speeds up deal-closing while focusing the contracting process on clarity around what the client is buying, and protection against value leakage. Work is taken off the legal team’s desks so that they can focus on delivering business value with higher-complexity transactions, and Radiant is continuously and demonstrably improving the service.

“You are clearly abreast with the latest thinking and tech, and with you we love that you are specialists - we do not feel like we were being used as an avenue to get into other business areas here. You are dedicated to fixing this. You also come across as task and goal oriented, with the tech to back it up. Your drive towards continuous improvement is very strong, and we appreciate your aim of efficiency without hampering quality.”