CASE STUDIES
CASE STUDY #1
De-bundle Legal Services
Client:
Financial institution
Their issues:
- Our client did high-end transactions and was not the cheapest on the market. Therefore, service was key to them.
- Transactional legal fees were passed through to customers.
- Customers were often dissatisfied with legal costs.
- A switch to a low-cost legal services provider was problematic. They needed a “vetting stamp” from a large firm due to the transaction value.
How Simplex Legal helped:
- Offered to perform a sampling of ‘problem’ legal invoices.
- Identified the main tasks in the process and who would be the most cost effective to do them.
- Restructured the process so that external firm supervised the overall transaction while subcontracting discrete tasks to low cost providers.
What Simplex Legal achieved for this client:
- Leveraged total legal spent paid by clients.
- Made a deal with 2 firms who are now focussed on high value-added tasks and overall supervision.
- Project legal costs down by 15% – in this case, paid by customers.
- Solved a customer service issue, but also created the opportunity to shine and show value.
CASE STUDY #2
Battle the Administration Dragon
Client:
Alberta Oil and Gas Company
Their issues:
- In-house legal team efficiency was compromised due to an acute administrative burden.
How Simplex Legal helped:
- Performed a work study to identify all administrative tasks done in the department.
- Took each one and scored it based on its need to be completed by a lawyer and relative importance to business.
- Pushed tasks that scored low on both fronts to other departments and/or non-legal administration.
- Re-focused team on high-scoring tasks.
What Simplex Legal achieved for this client:
- Work flow aligned with skills and priorities.
- Increase in efficiency.
- Increase in morale.
CASE STUDY #3
The Value of a Defined Workflow
Client:
Large Natural Resource Company
Their issues:
- Multi-jurisdictions. Procurement, purchasers in many different locations.
- The client’s policy was to have Legal review every contract before signing.
- Legal became a bottleneck in the workflow.
- It was most acute in the Procurement function.
- Staff in the field were dissatisfied with in-house legal processing time.
How Simplex Legal helped:
Define boundaries:
- Established guidelines on what Legal must review but more importantly what Legal won’t review.
- Prioritized what is most pressing and what matters most to the company.
Create new process:
- Designed an intake form in the language of the people who would complete it to gather basic information in a consistent way. This then fed into a tracking system.
- Files were now visible to all members of the team, priorities were flagged, cycle time was monitored and high-risk files got priority processing.
- Align resources using Simplex to equalize workflow.
What Simplex Legal achieved for this client:
- Increased processing efficiency that further enabled demand prediction and staffing needs (workflow management).
- Ability to offer a service commitment to the field and ensure rapid response time for top priority files.
- This acted as a retention tool – the internal team got the most strategic files.
- Side benefit: Legal department management now had data showing total number of contracts and their value which demonstrated department activity.