Case study
Modernising legal and business processes at global manufacturer with HighQ
HighQ creates a single source of truth for documents and data and accelerates critical tasks, including near-instant contract creation — improving visibility and supporting unified global operations
Introduction: About the company
A leading global manufacturer needed a unified digital platform to connect its geographically-spread legal team as it worked with a wide variety of business functions, including finance, tax, sales, procurement, and HR. Its aim was to accelerate processes, enhance transparency, and improve document and data consistency across the company.
10
Minutes for contract creation, instead of days
1
Single tool to track the whole contract lifecycle
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A variety of clear, consistent data is available in one click
The challenge: To create clarity and consistency
Like many large, global organisations, the company faced fragmented processes, variable ways of working, and inconsistent data. Its legal department wanted to accelerate and standardise critical tasks such as contract generation, gain better oversight of the entire contract lifecycle, leverage business data, create efficiency gains, track matter progress, and empower business teams while maintaining control.
Its goal was to create a single source of truth for all legal matters and company data, streamline collaboration, and enhance visibility across the business. Another priority was to reduce the time and resources required to generate and sign contracts — which typically took days of back-and-forth between the legal team, business units and counterparties. Its legal team was also keen that any solution could evolve with the company, offering scope to develop further use cases and deliver enhanced functionality over time.
“Our team is geographically distributed, and that’s why having a unified digital platform like HighQ is essential. We checked out a lot of options on the market and decided to move forward with HighQ due to the wide range of possibilities it offers and the potential for integration with other Thomson Reuters and third-party solutions.”
Corporate counsel
Leading manufacturer
The solution: To harness the power of data and automation
HighQ is deployed for a variety of purposes by the legal team and individual business departments, through dedicated sites that the legal team creates to meet their needs. This allows each group to operate independently within a secure, governed environment. HighQ serves as a centralised repository for documents and data, including data auto-extracted from contracts and workflows, as well as other information such as financial data. This data is extremely valuable for litigation management, intellectual property (IP) rights management, and contract lifecycle management (CLM). It improves transparency and provides insights into status, next steps, and upcoming tasks, such as renewals. “We have a lot of data available in one click,” the corporate counsel says.
When it comes to the CLM, the entire process — from creating contracts to sign-off — can be completed automatically using the Contract Express component of HighQ. Business units can generate their own contracts from automated templates, which are then sent directly to the counterparty for signature via DocuSign in HighQ. “We have a clear path for all agreements in HighQ,” she explains. “It supports contract creation and — thanks to the metadata we store about the contract, such as parties, dates, terms, and additional requirements — we can track the contract’s entire life and have an overview of all the contracts as well.”
The outcome: An accelerated contract cycle
Contract automation is a major time saver. “The whole contract creation cycle has been accelerated, and there’s much more visibility over the process,” the corporate counsel says. “Instead of emailing legal colleagues to get a contract created over the course of a day or two, they can generate contracts themselves in five minutes. They share it with the third party, and it can be signed in another five minutes. So the entire process can take as little as 10-15 minutes.”
Integrations with third-party solutions mean that information held in external databases, where necessary, is synced seamlessly with HighQ. Data visualisation tools provide clear insights into the company’s operations, while shared processes and automated workflows create a consistent approach and higher-quality results. Stakeholders report a very positive user experience. “Having HighQ has definitely helped our relationship with the business,” she says. “It shows Legal in a new light. We're not simply dealing with a contract: we’re an enabler for actions and a provider of support. It’s opened the door to a better understanding of what we do and, for us, a better understanding of the business.”
The company plans to harness more of HighQ's capabilities as it evolves. For example, it intends to create more structured intake forms for legal requests and develop further self-service tools. The corporate counsel concludes, “HighQ provides a great combination of flexibility and structure, together with the possibilities of automation. It gives us the opportunity to modernise our legal operations without significant support from the IT team. Each new use case is a success story for us.”
At a glance
Industry
Manufacturing
Solutions
HighQ
Contract Express
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