Global Law Firm

Global Law Firm Reduces Turnaround Time, Increases Profits and Improves Client Relations

A major global law firm is obtaining client instructions and delivering packages of complex, individually customized, inter-related contracts within hours. Legal personnel are freed up to spend more time advising their clients on more complex, critical issues. Clients appreciate receiving high quality documents in a fraction of the time and cost.

The firm has started replacing its existing legacy document assembly system with Exari (both internal and client facing). Since Exari is built from the ground up specifically for the web era, numerous benefits accrue including:

• End users interface with an intuitive, user friendly, transparent interface which enables them to preview a document in the browser, interact with it, and see why each clause was included;
• Template authors have much greater control and stability when using Exari’s XML authoring environment, especially when dealing with complex automation tasks;
• Using Exari’s powerful API, the Exari document engine can be called as part of a Service Oriented Architecture to exchange and capture data from external legacy systems (both upstream and downstream), then deliver highly customized output documents.

Solving the Internal Challenge

The firm’s initial challenge was to improve its internal efficiency by producing compliant contracts while simultaneously reducing both costs and turnaround times.

• Exari answered this challenge by:
• Empowering junior staff to elicit complete and accurate instructions;
• Automating the assembly of legally pre-approved, tailored agreements to match the instructions;
• Distributing the contract drafts and their attachments to staff and counterparties via email. Recipients who are entitled to make changes to the documents receive MS Word versions, while others receive only PDF versions;
• Escalating special terms to supervisors to enable rapid, online review, correction and approval; and
• Freeing the law firm’s partners from dependence on the IT Department for making changes to the automated agreement templates.

Improving Client Service

The Exari-based contract automation solution also helped the firm to win an enterprise-wide outside counsel consolidation engagement. The new client, a Global 500 multinational organization, appreciated the opportunity to complete thousands of sales contracts via end user self-service. A pilot demonstrated that quality levels exceed those incurred with old fashioned, manual document authoring via MS Word templates and clause libraries.

Better Client Retention

Exari facilitates a win-win relationship between the firm and its clients, encouraging a strong and loyal partnership-oriented engagement that lasts. Exari enhances the “stickiness” of the relationship:
The firm manages the format and legal content of the smart templates.
The client specifies the business terms and conditions.
The client’s employees answer questions using Exari’s intuitive web-based interface to trigger the automated assembly of draft and final versions of each contract.
Both the client’s GC and the firm’s partners are assured that all business and legal rules have been followed 100%, with much less need for laborious line-by-line contract review.

Business case benefits are quick and clear

Designed specifically for large law firms, Exari is both an intelligent forms system and a platform for online delivery of self-service documents direct to clients. It provides the tools to create smart templates, clause libraries and packages of documents so that legal work can be shared and re-used.

By using Exari for contract drafting, the firm achieved faster turnaround times, improved business focus, and produced consistent, error-free documents, which helped strengthen client relationships. Improved productivity allowed for fixed fee services with better margins, which improved profitability. And more effective knowledge sharing helped junior staff learn more quickly, which saved time and cost on training.

Profile: Full service commercial law firm providing clients with a full range of contracting and other services.