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.