In order to help the company transform their legal function, EY teams undertook a project to digitize the entirety of the legal department.
While discussions went back as far as 2018, the end of 2020 saw EY teams giving the green light to develop a Proof of Concept (POC).
The solution is based on technology from the Kim© platform, and legal knowledge from the recently acquired Riverview Law. It provides the business with a transparent, dashboard-controlled way to get visibility into their legal function operations, allowing them to:
- Take all work incoming to their global legal department
- Decide where to allocate it
- Manage approvals
- Allow for workflow planning
- Track throughput time
The Kim platform, similar to IT ticketing platforms, manages the work allocation. It allows the GC and the legal departments to understand the workflow of the incoming legal inquiries and provides insights on: what work is coming into the legal department, where it is coming from and where it needs to go, how long it will take and how much it costs. That knowledge allows GCs to assess how well their teams are performing, and to analyze the capacity of the team or a single lawyer.
To start with, the POC project looked at one unit in particular within the bank’s legal operations to implement a version of the legal operations platform. This was then iterated gradually over a period of 12 weeks, until a final version was established. Several different stakeholders across EY and the company were involved in this process to facilitate its success.
Presenting to the general counsel, the bank’s own legal team expressed enthusiasm for the project, and they are now working with EY teams to build out the platform to cover more and more areas of the business.
To do so, the EY teams and the bank’s legal teams are working across multiple geographies, with groups based in London, Northern England, Switzerland, across central Europe, and in India.
The project is being implemented with an iterative development model, where five practice groups are being run in parallel. Once one solution has been implemented, the project will move on to the next one. To maintain the sprint approach, every week there is a catch up to review progress and make sure everything remains on track.