Reducing CBS's contract turnaround times by 30% by optimising their legal operations

Coventry Building Society (CBS) is a leading financial institution, which provides mortgages and savings products to individuals, and is dedicated to helping make people better off throughout their lives.

CBS faced a familiar obstacle: an excessive volume of third-party contracts needing review, with constrained resources to manage the workload efficiently. In search of a comprehensive solution, they engaged TLB to support them with CaaS AI.

By partnering with TLB, CBS experienced a 30% reduction in contract turnaround times, increased productivity across the legal team who were now freed up to do more value-add work and better job satisfaction as their ambitious lawyers got to work on what they really wanted to.

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What’s CaaS AI and how did it work for CBS?

Caas AI

Caas AI is TLB’s AI-powered contract review and negotiation offering. We couple cutting edge Artificial Intelligence with our human expertise to deliver speedy, accurate and cost-effective contract management support, end-to-end whilst in parallel optimising teams’ legal operations for long-term added value.

To begin with, we kicked off with a Discovery session where CBS shared information with us about their stakeholder landscape, risk appetite, preferred contract positions, general contract management processes and what tech they’re using. We also reviewed their template contracts and held a separate session with their Legal Ops team to understand how they were utilising their CLM and Legal Front Door.

Playbooks

From there, we tailored our TLB Standard Playbook to suit their preferred positions, complete with fallback positions, risk threshold matrix and approvals matrix.

IT integration

CBS wanted a comprehensive solution so they opted into our ‘Ask Legal’ bolt-on;

With ‘Ask Legal’ we took on all contract-related queries from the business, both pre and post-execution as well all queries on process and other administrative matters. To facilitate this without Legal becoming a bottleneck, we got set up on their Legal Front Door as a user so all business requests would come directly to us, freeing up Legal from routine queries and having to act as a post-box.

Templates

We also provided recommendations on how to tailor their template agreements so they could be used more extensively, thereby reducing the number of third party agreements that came in for review.

Contract Management

After an intro to the business teams and the rest of Legal, CBS’s business teams started to send us their contracts for review which we turned around within our 1-3 day SLA.

Liaising directly with the business and with third parties as needed, we led negotiations end-to-end. We managed all contract-related queries that came from the business including advising on how provisions should be interpreted, how rights can be exercised and how suppliers can be held to account through enforcing the obligations in the contract.

Once a contract had been finalised, support with execution and ensure it was stored properly with the correct metadata.

Reporting ‍

We made sure CBS Legal stayed in the loop through weekly WIP reports and also provided meaningful insights into their contract landscape through monthly reports. Separately, we provided recommendations on how to further improve their contract operations through our Quarterly Optimisation Reports.

Informed by data gathered through our AI system, we offered suggestions on how to reduce friction in their negotiation process by optimising their playbook positions as we saw that deviated from some of their preferred positions more often than not.

Through our expert team of legal operations specialists, we also made recommendations on how to amend the language in the form they used on their Legal Front Door to ensure responses from the business were more accurate and complete.

Contract Management

We began delivering from day 1, turning contracts around within our 1-3 day SLA. The red flag reports in particular delivered huge value to Toyota, as they were able to clearly articulate risks and how to mitigate them to the business in relation to their high volume, low risk contracts.

Legal Process Optimisation

Toyota also implemented our recommendations to improve their intake and storage processes, having a meaningful impact on their speed to engage with the business and to contract more broadly.

Reporting

We provided Toyota with complete visibility over what they sent us with our weekly WIP reports and also provided meaningful insights into their contract landscape through monthly reports. Separately, we provided recommendations on how to further improve their contract operations through our Quarterly Optimisation Reports.

Template Redesign

We also carried out an extensive redesign of CBS’ Procurement templates, to remove as much friction from the contracting process as possible, whilst adequately protecting CBS from a regulatory and legal risk and compliance perspective.

By partnering with TLB, CBS experienced a 30% reduction in contract turnaround times and 50% increased team satisfaction across the legal team who were now freed up to do more value-add work that they really wanted to do.