GUIDE

The ultimate guide to

building a scaleable legal

function in SaaS
Contents

The building blocks of a scalable legal function in SaaS

Strategy

Approach

Collaboration

People

Process

Legal Tech

The legal function maturity model

2
Scaling the legal function in SaaS

There’s no denying the boom in software over the last decade. As barriers
to entry decline and demand for convenience accelerates, more and more
tech companies are appearing to address the ever-growing market for
online services.

SaaS (Software as a Service) companies, whose assets are largely intangible,

are building high-growth and high-margin business and revenue models. As
a result, they entice significant investment and unlock scale at pace.

However, the very benefits that generate demand also make SaaS a highly
crowded market. To succeed (and to justify their rising valuations to
investors), SaaS companies must delight their users, establish unique
competitive advantages and create a culture that retains top talent and
encourages innovation.

As you can likely imagine, this high-growth, tech-powered and cross-border

environment creates a minefield of legal complexities. As a result, the legal
function of a SaaS company has a critical role to play in business success.

Not only do legal departments protect the business from harm’s way, but
in-house professionals are increasingly adopting a strategic advisory role to
spot opportunities and better prepare for scale.

That said, despite significant investment across the business, the legal
department tends to remain lean, with disproportionately low growth
in headcount.

For this reason, we’ve created this guide that covers the building blocks of a
scalable legal function. I hope it will provide you with the foundations to set
your legal team up for scaling success.

Thibaut Caoudal
Co-founder @ Leeway

3
Strategy
The purpose and priorities of scalable legal teams.
 The building blocks of a scalable legal function | Strategy
Traditionally, in-house legal teams could
focus on the job at hand. In super-fast
SaaS companies, however, in addition to
executing the daily tasks, in-house legal
professionals will find themselves having
to look forward and plan accordingly.
At its core, a strategy is a plan of action
designed to achieve longer-term goals.
It outlines the approach and tactics
required to move closer to an overall
objective that defines legal success.
Now let me stop you right there before
you run off and write a concrete
strategy on a static document.
For scaling legal functions in SaaS, your
strategy should be around thinking and
acting strategically, putting the relevant
tactics in motion to enable this, and
keeping wider business goals front-of-
mind at all times.
Being strategic means having clear goals
and a plan of action to achieve them.
More importantly, these goals must be
aligned to wider business objectives.
It means prioritizing strategic matters
and adopting relevant processes, tools,
and technology to free up capacity to
do so (more on how to do this in the
following sections).
Why is strategy important?
In SaaS companies, the success of the
legal function is directly linked to the
clarity around and execution of its
strategic frameworks.
As SaaS business models enable them to
be incredibly agile, it’s crucial for Legal
to have a mechanism in place to keep
up with changing business priorities.
5
Operating strategically means that Legal
understands where the business needs
to be in 3, 6, 12 months’ time and
contributes to this by addressing any
legal roadblocks and protecting the
company along the way. It ensures that
all actions are focused on the activities
that have the greatest business impact.
How to ace your strategy
Implement legal OKRs
In addition to setting their goals (or
KPIs), best-in-class SaaS legal teams also
set OKRs to better articulate the value
of the legal department, enable greater
focus, and more agile working.
OKRs, which stands for Objective and
Key Results, are a goal-setting tool that
inspires teams to set ambitious goals
while articulating the granular stepping
stones needed to achieve them.
Used by top tech companies such as
Google, Spotify, and LinkedIn across
their product, tech, sales, and marketing
teams, OKRs are an increasingly
important tool to articulate the value of
the legal department in a language that
the business understands.
You can learn more about OKRs and
access our free template here.
"You really need to understand
the business model as well as the
emerging trends and how we can
tackle these."
Senay Gurel
General Counsel @ Voodoo
 The building blocks of a scalable legal function | Strategy
Create a legal roadmap
Roadmaps are flexible planning tools
that support strategic and longer-term
planning by defining the overarching
topics that Legal will seek to address in
the coming quarters.
Adopting a legal roadmap helps the
team to understand its strategic
priorities and corresponding actions
within a bigger picture context.
As it forces you to look to the future,
legal teams working to a roadmap have
the foresight to put things in place today
that limit blockers in the future.
The clear direction of travel also helps
to secure a budget for specific projects
or resources as it's easier to articulate
legal requirements aligned to business
needs. See the simple example below.
Example legal roadmap
Q1
Setting priorities & Review Q4's OKR results
tracking success Define Q2 OKRs
Review contract
management process
Activity
Implement weekly standups
Review Privacy Policy
A common challenge
A prominent challenge facing legal
departments is the rising volume of
workload; resulting in a lack of time to
focus on higher-value, strategic matters.
To tackle this, proactively explore and
implement the right tools, processes,
and mindset to automate tasks and
streamline workflows. More on how to
do this in the following sections.
Conduct regular strategic reviews
Often operating in two-monthly or
quarterly cycles to accommodate fast-
changing priorities, SaaS companies can
change direction quickly and equip
themselves to do so at pace. Their legal
teams should be able to do the same.
With this in mind, the tools, resources,
and processes in place today might not
be optimal in six months' time.
To scale with the business, legal teams
should conduct regular strategic reviews
to assess and update how they work and
what their focus is in line with current
business priorities.
Successful reviews are conducted with
the foresight of the legal roadmap and
complemented by the execution and
prioritization given through legal OKRs.
Q2 Q3 Q4
Review Q1's OKR results Review Q2's OKR results Review Q3's OKR results
Define Q3 OKRs Define Q4 OKRs Define Q1 OKRs
Scope CLM solution Implement CLM solution
Contract training for
Implement retrospectives Monitor vendor
business teams
performance
Review legal matter Draft legal budget
request process Start fundraise prep
Measuring success
Legal OKRs (discussed above) are
tracked and measured over the course
of a quarter. Therefore, they provide a
useful framework to measure the
success of Legal's strategic activity.
OKRs are also a great framework to
articular the value of the legal function
to the wider business in a language that
they understand.
6
Approach
How scalable legal teams think, execute and prepare for the future.
 The building blocks of a scalable legal function | Approach
If you’re working in a SaaS company,
you’ll know that things move fast. SaaS
businesses bring out new products and
features at pace, integrate with third
parties, raise investment, and more.
With this in mind, the legal team’s
approach must be agile, with a balance
between proactivity and reactivity.
While your strategy is a plan of action to
achieve your goals, your approach is the
way in which you deal with the situation
in front of you. Setting an effective
default response mechanism is key to
scale a legal function.
Why does your approach
matter?
Setting an effective approach and
default response mechanism is key to
scale a legal function.
As explored in the previous section, it’s
important that in-house SaaS legal
teams think and act strategically.
While your strategy means you have the
map towards success, your approach is
the difference between rigidly following
a plan and discovering scalability
through agility and clever resourcing.
Scalable legal functions approach work
in a way that unlocks efficiencies and
delivers better outcomes more quickly.
How to ace your approach
Proactively doing more with less
Increasingly, legal teams are being asked
to do more with less.
8
While this can feel like a challenge at
first, approaching it with proactivity and
optimism means you will be able to
adopt more efficient processes to drive
better results - a key component of
scaling legal functions!
A common misconception is that doing
more with less is about cost-cutting.
While this may be the case in some
instances, it's more about optimizing
resources - both human and tech - with
a view to driving greater business value.
It also involves avoiding any activities
that are not aligned with the strategy
and objectives of the business.
High-performing legal departments in
SaaS achieve this by reimagining the
delivery of legal services. To do so, they
operate in line with their business and
its objectives, upskill their team,
collaborate near-seamlessly with all
stakeholders, and position themselves
as strategic advisors.
"If you're lean and nimble, you're
able to move faster in different
directions. Speed ​is always going
to be an advantage so this is key
for scaling companies."
Frances Coyle
Legal Consultant
Adopt agile working
To keep pace with the business and free
up capacity to focus on higher-value,
more strategy matters, legal teams
should adopt agile working.
 The building blocks of a scalable legal function | Approach

This will allow them to cater to dynamic Prioritization

requirements in a more fluid manner
The prioritization of legal work is
(despite facing a larger workload).
absolutely critical in a context where
Agile working is all about being more workload outweighs resources.
efficient and adaptive to achieve results.
Having clarity over how the legal team
This approach takes larger challenges,
prioritizes work will help you make
breaks them down into more
faster, smarter decisions and achieve
incremental tasks, and then prioritizes
results more effectively and efficiently.
them by their relative value add.
As mentioned in the previous chapter,
To enable scale, agile working shifts the
implementing OKRs enables you to
focus from processes to outcomes
understand where tasks lie in terms of
(giving yourself permission to ditch a
priority hierarchy and business impact.
plan if it isn't delivering the outcomes
you’re aspiring for). You can also use the company's risk
appetite to help you prioritize work.
Agile legal teams work in time blocks
Think about whether this task is really
(e.g. two-week sprints), have regular
something you should be spending your
check-ins with a view to working
valuable time on. Consider the risk-
smarter, not longer when it comes to
reward ratio and whether your time
completing tasks, and implement the
would have a greater impact elsewhere.
right technology to streamline
processes (more to come on this). Clarity over these matters will help you
make faster, more confident decisions
You can learn more about how to create
when you realize that you cannot do
a more agile legal department here.
everything.

A common challenge Measuring success

The nature of legal work makes it tough To measure the success of your
to measure. It's different from other approach, reflect on what changes
departments in that activity is largely you’ve made within the legal department
focused on preventative measures. over the last 3, 6, 12 months.

Yet, by adopting agile methodologies, If you’ve saved time through changes in

you can unlock efficiencies that free up process, the automation of tasks, faster
time to focus on higher-value matters. decision-making, and reaching results
This shifts the perception of legal as a more quickly thanks to agile working,
cost center to a strategic partner. you’ll be able to scale more effectively.

9
Collaboration
Legal in the context of a wider scaling business.
 The building blocks of a scalable legal function | Collaboration
Collaboration
In SaaS, cross-function collaboration is
critical to ensure company-wide
understanding and the smooth running
of external launches and internal
updates.
Whether you’re a one-person legal
department or a larger legal team,
collaboration is a key characteristic of
scalable legal functions and high-
performing teams. This means the legal
team must collaborate effectively
internally while also working closely with
other departments to achieve common
goals.
Collaboration for scale also requires
strong leadership from in-house
counsel and this must be delivered in a
way that is easy to follow for the rest of
the business.
Why is collaboration vital?
With an extremely fast pace of business,
legal teams in SaaS must collaborate well
or risk slowing down the business,
putting the company at risk, and wasting
time on tasks that add little to no value.
Effective collaboration also helps the
business understand the value of the
legal function. With this knowledge, it
becomes easier to secure additional
Legal budget and resources (a welcome
benefit for SaaS legal departments!).
Also, SaaS companies that are going
through the scaleup phase often have
more people or teams than their
communication structure is set up for.
11
Therefore, Legal must be proactive in
getting the information they need to
prepare and execute strategically.
Not to mention, if you successfully
achieve frictionless collaboration as well
as high-impact output, you can rebrand
Legal as a business enabler.
How to ace collaboration
Set regular check-ins with other teams
Build close relationships with business
teams and secure time to understand
the company’s plans in the short term
and long term. This will enable the legal
team to prepare and act in line with
these goals.
In addition, legal teams operating in the
SaaS space will receive an ever-
increasing volume of requests. Regular
conversations with other departments
will help you understand what is driving
the influxes in demand so that you can
reassess, prioritize and implement
processes or technology to reduce the
amount of legal intervention required.
These check-ins can be as simple as
attending a meeting they already have in
place once a month.
 The building blocks of a scalable legal function | Collaboartion
Regular cross-company legal training
Legal matters affect the entire company.
That's why best-in-class SaaS legal
teams build a company-wide collective
of legal advocates.
Legal culture is created by executing
regular training sessions with business
teams. For instance, you can meet with
Product to explore compliance, Finance
to explore vendor management, and
Sales to explore contracts.
Not only does this raise the bar in terms
of the starting point of legal tasks but it
also breaks down barriers between
Legal and the rest of the business.
Articulate the legal function' value
In order to scale the legal function, you
must be able to articulate the value of
the legal department. Without this, you
will not be able to secure the buy-in,
budget, and resources required to scale.
To achieve this, ensure you understand
who you’re engaging with and how they
like to communicate. Don’t be tempted
to make this more complex than it
needs to be. Business teams tend to
prefer concise communication.
A common challenge
Many legal teams struggle to shake the
perception of legal as a cost center,
making collaboration difficult. To unlock
scalability, legal should become as
accessible as possible by proactively
engaging with teams in a way that
highlights their business acumen as well
as legal expertise.
12
Generally, in SaaS, you will want to
articulate legal’s value on three levels.
Tactical value
This outlines the quantity of output
delivered by the legal department. It
might include how many contracts have
been processed or how long it takes for
a contract to be signed, on average.
Operational value
This focuses on time and money saved
thanks to the impact of new tools, tech,
or processes. For instance, if you
implement a contract management
platform, how much resource has been
saved thanks to self-serve contracts?
Strategic value
This is centered on the idea that legal is
a mechanism for business growth. Give
qualitative examples of how the legal
team is presenting itself as a business
adviser. For example, have you made
suggestions to better position the
business in light of changing social or
economic factors?
You will find the information you need to
articulate your value by using Legal OKRs
mentioned previously, but remember,
this must be delivered in a collaborative
manner to reap the benefits.
Measuring success
You can measure the success of your
collaboration efforts through anecdotal
feedback from other teams as well as by
how often legal has become a blocker
for business teams (which has hopefully
reduced as a result of regular check-ins,
simple language, and wider appreciation
for legal).
People
To hire or not to hire: the makeup of a scalable legal function.
 The building blocks of a scalable legal function | People
People
To cope with fast growth and to
capitalize on opportunities, SaaS
companies hire rapidly within business
teams. However, despite the rising
workload, the legal headcount tends to
grow at a significantly lower rate.
The legal team may consist of one or
many people but the setup can include
internal resource such as in-house
lawyers and legal operations
professionals as well as outside counsel.
The key to scale is creating the right
legal structure for your specific goals
and plans.
Why is the setup of your
legal function important?
With an ever-increasing workload and
declining resources, it can be difficult to
know whether you should hire more
lawyers, hire more operational staff, or
engage with outside counsel.
A common challenge
Often, to scale, companies' knee-jerk
reaction is to hire more lawyers.
For scaling SaaS companies, you want to
be able to do more with fewer costs - so
instead of automatically hiring another
lawyer, first explore your options to free
up capacity by automating tasks,
streamlining processes, and hiring
operational support.
6
14
It's important to note the difference
between growing and scaling. Growing
simply increases the legal headcount
whereas scaling increases the value of
the legal department without increasing
the costs to the same extent.
As other teams begin to hire rapidly, the
legal department has to master a lean
legal approach. Understanding your
options when it comes to resourcing,
and choosing the right fit for your
scenario is key to scale the legal
function in line with business growth.
How to resource your team
Finding the right balance
To scale the legal function, there are
four options:
1. Hire more people
2. Optimize resource internally
3. Utilize external legal support
4. A blend of 1-3
Use the decision tree on the following
page to help you explore your options.
Measuring success
To measure the success of your people
and resourcing strategy, use the
decision tree on the following page to
ensure you have exhausted your options
before hiring more people.
For stance, you may be able to free up
significant resource by implementing a
CLM platform that enables business
teams to self-serve certain contracts.
 The building blocks of a scalable legal function | People

'To hire or not to hire': a decision tree for scaling legal functions

Are all members of the legal team

working on high value tasks?

No Yes

Does the legal roadmap require Does the excess workload

specialized legal expertise? require legal expertise?

No Yes No Yes

Have you reviewed your tools and

Hire more people
processes in the last 3 months and
(e.g. legal ops)
implemented improvements?

Do you already have this

No Yes
expertise in your team?

Optimize resources
Yes No
internally

Repeat the flow Will you need this expertise on

an ongoing basis?

No Yes

Optimize resource internally,

Utilize external
consider external legal support Hire more lawyers
legal support
and hire more people

15
Process
Using processes as a lever for scale.
 The building blocks of a scalable legal function | Process

Process
SaaS companies are full of innovative How to ace your processes
and streamlined processes, and Legal
should be no exception. Standardization

Investment in SaaS companies results in Building standardization into your

businesses having to scale at pace. This
heightens the importance of having
robust yet flexible processes in place to
ensure things are done correctly in the
face of mounting pressure and speed.
Legal processes are a series of actions
taken in order to complete a specific
task. In Legal, these processes will often
involve multiple, cross-company
stakeholders and, therefore, must be
simple to understand and execute.
To scale, you must implement
operationally savvy, risk-proportionate,
and of course scalable processes.
processes saves time, creates clarity,
and improves relationships. To
implement standardization, list down the
most common requests of the legal
department. Then, explore which tasks
result in similar output and implement
standardization for this activity.
For instance, you might adopt oneNDA,
a standardized NDA, to reduce the
amount of time spent on negotiation.
Or, as requests increase as you scale,
you might implement a legal request
form to ensure you have all relevant
information at first touch.

Why is process important?

To manage the escalating workload as
the company grows, legal teams must
adopt a new legal operating model that
provides more autonomy to the
business while still offering control over
legal and financial risks.

If they don’t adapt their processes, they

risk halting business growth, blocking
revenue, reducing the visibility over
business risk, and leaving significant time
savings untapped.
To scale, Legal cannot be bogged down
by high-volume, low-value (but
necessary) tasks. Processes should free
up Legal capacity to focus on higher-
value, more strategic legal matters.
17
Automation
Automation is when software executes
legal tasks, processes, or workflows,
either in part or in entirety. Generally,
this means implementing the right
technology (more on this in the following
section) to reduce the burden of more
manual and routine legal tasks.
 The building blocks of a scalable legal function | Process
To implement automation, list what legal
tasks take the most time. Often, these
are lower-value but necessary tasks that
ensure compliance. From here, explore
what technology is available to automate
this high-volume activity.
For instance, you can automate the
creation of routine contracts using an
automated workflow with contract
templates through Leeway.
"If we all begin from the same
starting point, particularly with
regards to contracts that are
lower value and higher volume,
the efficiency that we could gain
would be immense."
Electra Japonas
Co-founder @ oneNDA
A common challenge
A critical point to emphasize here is that
in-house lawyers should not be precious
about processes. They should be open
to challenging and changing the ways
things are done in order to find a better
and faster way. Take pride in the
outcomes, not the process.
This means a shift in mindset from "We
must follow the process" to "How can
we change the process to achieve
better outcomes faster?". Processes
should enable scale; ensuring that Legal
does not become a bottleneck.
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Give greater autonomy to the business
Giving more autonomy to business
teams can free up Legal’s time from
lower-value process-driven tasks and
enable them to focus on more strategic,
higher-value work.
While both standardization and
automation will help give greater
autonomy to business teams, legal tech
solutions like Leeway present even
greater opportunities to streamline
processes and reduce manual legal
workload.
The most obvious example is self-serve
contracts that enable business teams to
generate certain contracts without the
need for legal intervention. The legal
team maintains control over legal and
financial risk as contract templates are
pulled from a centralized library and
approval workflows dependent on
defined conditions are set by the legal
team.
Measuring success
For scaling legal functions in SaaS, the
success of your processes should be
analyzed in conjunction with the
business teams who are also impacted.
You may wish to gather anecdotal
feedback on changes in process to
understand what’s working well and
what may need further refinement.
In addition, track the reduction in
requests coming into the legal
department. Processes should result in
fewer requests so that Legal can focus
on strategic, higher-value matters.
Legal Tech
Equipping the legal team with tools for the future.
 The building blocks of a scalable legal function | Legal Tech
It is fair to assume that SaaS companies
are open to adopting new technologies.
In fact, generally, business teams such
as Sales, Marketing, Finance, and HR will
likely have adopted a dedicated tool for
their function. Yet, many in-house legal
departments, even in SaaS, are still not
experiencing the benefits of a dedicated
legal platform.
Legal technology, or legal tech, refers to
the use of software to enable legal
services and support. In terms of scaling
the legal function, it presents the
opportunity to improve processes and
collaboration in such as way that
enables the legal team to focus on
strategic matters while maintaining
visibility over legal and financial risks.
Why is legal tech important?
To scale the legal function, adopting
legal tech is an absolute must. The
manual management of contracts is
simply not a viable option as you scale.
Therefore, we would advise that you
embrace legal tech as early as possible
as, without it, it'll be near impossible to
scale the legal function.
When it comes to scaling, tech is all
about optimizing your time and
managing risk. This means freeing up
time to focus on higher-value matters
by minimizing high-volume, low-value
tasks, as well as increasing the visibility
of legal and financial risk.
How to assess legal tech
Firstly, using process mapping, identify
exactly what your needs are.
19
Then you can begin to explore what
solutions will work best for your needs.
For scaling legal functions, there are a
number of key areas to think about.
Future-proof solutions
In SaaS, things move fast. This is why
when selecting a piece of legal tech, it's
important to consider the direction of
the business, its future needs, and the
functionality required to support it.
However, to get the ball rolling, start
small with a simple use case (e.g. NDAs
or HR contracts).
Usability for non-lawyers
As we’ve explored, in-house counsel
must work closely with business teams
to enable scale and deliver impactful
outcomes. Therefore, technology
implemented should also be accessible
and easy to use for non-legal
professionals.
When researching your options, think
about the user experience, language
used, and functionality required for
business teams also. This includes how
well the tech will integrate with current
tools in use (e.g. Salesforce, Zapier and
Google Drive).
"Automation of processes is a
must! Tools that help you
negotiate in real-time without the
need to exchange documents
over emails and taking loads of
time are also beneficial."
Lyuba Popova
Senior Legal Counsel @ Paysafe.
 The building blocks of a scalable legal function | Legal Tech
Scalable pricing structure
It’s important to think about the pricing
structure of your potential tech as the
wider the adoption within the company,
the greater impact you'll experience.
For instance, if all teams adopt a CLM
platform, then they will be able to self-
serve appropriate contracts and the
legal team will save time while still having
full visibility over legal and financial risk.
To boost company-wide adoption, some
legal tech vendors offer role-based
license fees. For instance, at Leeway,
only core users are charged a license
fee, with internal employees and
counterparties being able to use the
platform for free.
A common challenge
A key blocker to the adoption of legal
tech is securing the budget. However, if
you’ve built on the steps mentioned
throughout this guide, it’s likely that your
business will understand the value of the
legal function and, thus, the value in
unlocking more legal capacity.
In addition, aim to involve Finance and IT
from the outset. They will reap benefits
from the tool and can support in
building the business case to invest.
20
BONUS:
Implementing legal tech
In summary, there are six steps
to follow when implementing a
CLM platform.
1. Cataloging - archiving all
company contracts and
templates
2. Data import - importing legacy
contracts into a centralized
repository in the CLM
3. Customization - create custom
workflows by contract type
4. User training - teach all potential
users how to use the tool
competently
5. Follow up - monitoring the use
of the platform to ensure
adoption
6. Exploration - get the information
you need quickly with all
contract data in one place
Measuring success
From the outset, you should know what
you’re hoping to achieve. For instance,
do you want to save lawyers' time, avoid
missing deadlines and renewals, or
reduce negotiation cycles? Measuring
against these initial goals is one way to
analyze the success of implementation.
In addition, you might focus on metrics
such as time saved by the automatic
generation of contracts and approval
workflows, or average time to signed
contract, as well as gathering anecdotal
insights from the business users.
The legal function
maturity model
 Preparing to scale

In summary, SaaS companies are To do so, you must understand your

founded on business models that unlock starting point. Armed with this
scale at pace. Their revenue models knowledge, you can prioritize actions
supercharge investment in areas such as that move you closer to becoming a
Engineering, Product, and Sales. high-performing, scalable legal function.
Despite significant investment across Below, you'll find a model that explores
the business, the legal department often the different levels of legal departments'
remains lean, with disproportionately readiness to scale and what each stage
low growth in headcount. might look like in practice.
With this in mind, for legal teams to You can use this model to:
effectively support a business as it Evaluate your current situation
scales, they must scale intelligently. Define where you want to be
Understand the next steps
This means optimizing resources,
operating cohesively, and thinking If you have any questions regarding this
strategically by addressing the topics guide, please don’t hesitate to get in
mentioned throughout this guide. touch. Best of luck!

Preparing to scale: legal function maturity model

Not scalable Scalable Top performing

Prioritizes strategic work Legal OKRs & KPIs

Completes work in the order it came in
KPIs in place Legal roadmap in place
Little strategic activity
Strategy Little automation
Aligned to business goals Regular strategic and operational reviews
Automates low value-added tasks Legal-specific mission & values
No one is responsible for looking ahead
Regular communication with other teams Everyone in the team thinks strategically

Agile working in place

Struggles to adapt to change in direction
Approach No clear rhythm to work
Implement was suits current scenario
Legal presence in relevant business
Always thinking about future implications
team meetings
Delivers sustainable outcomes
Awareness and preparation for changing
Regular check-ins with the business to
market dynamics
understand future business needs

Legal works in a silo Works closely with business teams

Rebrands legal internally
Collaboration Little understanding of the business' Minimizes legalese / complex language
Educates business teams on legal matters
direction of travel Understands the business' roadmap

Hires fast Hires slow

Hires more people by default
People May hire lawyers who struggle to thrive in a
fast-paced environment
Designs resource setup based on future
Hires on more than legal knowledge
Optimizes resources with an
business needs
Explores non-lawyer legal hires
internal/external balance

Implements automation Implements standardization

Manual workload
Empowers business teams Regularly reviews and optimizes processes
Process Rigid, outdated processes
Streamlines processes Gathers feedback from business teams
Legal may cause a bottleneck
Challenges the way things are done Keeps up-to-date with new solutions

Implements solutions suitable for future

Little to no tech in place Cool Person Ensures company-wide adoption
Legal business needs
May implement solutions that won't be fit for of solutions
technology Selects solutions that areFancy Job @
suitable for Awesome Company
purpose in the years to come Keeps up-to-date with new solutions
non-lawyers also

22
Appendix
The summary of bits the bobs mentioned throughout this guide.
 Appendix

Useful resources

How to create a more agile

Our OKR guide and template
legal deparment

Get the free template Find out here

About Leeway

Leeway is the new way to manage the
entire contract lifecycle in a smart,
collaborative, and secure way.
We believe the current way of managing
contracts has a negative impact on the
business and productivity. It creates
losses through the time spent by the
various stakeholders involved in the
contract lifecycle, the risks caused by
the manual management of
negotiations, and finally the loss of
revenue as a result of unclear data
contained in contracts once they have
been signed.
With fragmented and complex stages
that make it impossible to be efficient,
there is a major opportunity to reinvent
the contractualisation process.
Our technology allows us to drastically
reduce the number of round-trips
during negotiations by intelligently
generating a first version of the contract
tailored to the context of the
negotiation.
Based on these contracts, Leeway
accompanies you in the negotiation
through a shared platform that allows
you to collaborate easily with the various
stakeholders, both internal and external.
Finally, your contracts are connected to
the platform and your data comes to life
to help you manage your business, not
miss any deadlines, and identify further
opportunities.
Want to learn more
about Leeway?
Discover our intuitive and secure
SaaS solution for contract
management in a few minutes.
Request a demo

24
 Appendix

So what difference does Leeway actually make?

Without Leeway With Leeway

Contract generation is based on the The contract is generated automatically

management of a pool of contract thanks to an intelligent clausier which is
templates and/or clauses, which is enriched according to the company's
exclusively manual work and very di!cult to negotiation history.
maintain over time.

Collaboration during the negotiation phase The exchanges are managed directly from
results in many versions of the contract the platform and all modifications are
bring shared in email chains. automatically recorded, remaining
accessible at all times.

Each contract is starting again and does not The lawyer is assisted throughout the
capitalize on the company's negotiation contract revision phase, with automatic
history. suggestions based on their negotiation
history.

The data in signed contracts is not usable All contract data is entered only once in
for the company because the contracts are the contract and is automatically tracked
stored in PDF format. over time.

The signed contract is stored randomly, All strategic company documents are
sometimes on a drive, sometimes locally accessible at the click of a button and
and it takes a long time to find it. access is managed with confidence.

Lawyers struggle to justify the value of their Lawyers can easily extract all their data
work to their superiors. and analyse the impact of their actions

25
getleeway.com