Fieldfisher accelerates time to value with centralized contract management

Fieldfisher is a full-service firm whose strength in energy and natural resources, financial services, life sciences, and technology forms the backbone of the highly commercial legal advice it provides to clients. To make it stand out even more, Fieldfisher wanted to offer clients a user-friendly contract management portal.

The challenge

Siloed systems complicate workflows

Recently, one of Fieldfisher’s commercial clients approached the firm to review some of its contracts. But first, the client had to overcome a specific challenge: they relied on multiple law firms to draft and manage its contracts. As a result, the client had documents saved in various formats across different locations, making it hard to access, share, or even read the contracts.

There was no standard system for knowledge management. To streamline the contract management process, the client wanted a single place to organize and collate all its agreements. With successful experience using HighQ — Thomson Reuters’ intelligent, user-friendly workflow platform — Fieldfisher knew precisely how to help.

The solution

HighQ streamlines knowledge management

Fieldfisher was already looking at how it could make the most of its HighQ investment, especially given the increased document automation functionality following the integration with Contract Express. Until now, the firm used HighQ to help clients create repositories and Wikis to manage internal knowledge. Fieldfisher knew it could offer additional value by easing the day-to-day workflow processes and reducing back-and-forth email communications, which complicated version control.

“It is widely known that HighQ is best-of-breed among knowledge management platforms and information sharing,” noted Rochelle Garnon, Head of Knowledge & Information Services at Fieldfisher. That’s why the firm recommended using the artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities within HighQ to classify documents and make the vast majority machine readable.

“It was a very user-friendly platform to analyze the information once we've got it and turned it into a usable format,” added Garnon. “That was the beauty of it. We didn’t have to send the information to 50,000 different places to make the information useable.”

All the client had to do was upload the documents into HighQ. From there, the Fieldfisher teams could work directly to extract the relevant contract information into an iSheet. This robust, spreadsheet-like database allows users to share and track data collaboratively. The data within an iSheet is also quickly visible on the portal’s dashboard for review and circulation between Fieldfisher and its clients.

The results

Time savings leads to new opportunities

Without HighQ, contract management was time consuming and complicated. But now the process is simple, standardized, and seamless. The versatility of HighQ made it easy to turn around an impactful solution, which helped improve Fieldfisher’s relationship with the client. “Our client became much more confident with the information that they currently had, and it allowed us to take the next steps in contract management. We showed how nice it can be to seamlessly keep everything in one place,” noted Garnon.

Even though this project mainly focused on contracts, the client was so impressed with the overall service that it plans to use the platform for additional services and support. Also, the seamless integration and time savings achieved with HighQ has opened up new opportunities for Fieldfisher, enabling it to take on projects that it had not previously considered.