The context
The harbor welcomes over 1600 ships every year which means that they need to be in business with over 100 service providers: ship owners and transport companies, refueling tankers, mechanics, agents and ship brokers, customs, pilots and tug boats…
The project
Like all other ports, the Bordeaux harbor must deal with multiple litigations: cargo damage or loss, non-payment of royalties, etc. They must also deal with contracts and renewing insurance policies. With the increase in business the legal department is also faced with a significant increase in workload. They took a decision in 2003 to implement specialized software to insure a more reactive follow up of their activity.
Their choice
After searching on the internet and meetings with 3 providers their final choice was Legal Suite with 3 of their modules: Legal Advising, Litigation and Insurance. All their data that had been entered in Excel spreadsheets since 1995 were merged into the Legal Suite. “In our business it is very important to keep a complete history of our litigations some of which can last up to 10 years. The software allows us to easily access all our information consequently saving us a lot of time” says, Laurence Da Silva-Larvor, Legal Director.
The benefits
The Legal Advising module has become very practical to become more reactive to internal and external demands. “Before we implemented the software, in order to find the terms of a file, we had to go through our paper records which was quite tedious”. Wanting to be even more effective in their work the legal team added a document generator to the “Insurance” module in order to automatically create mail linked to insurance contracts.
For purposes of this website, all quotations have been translated into the English language
