Guillaume ROUH, Project manager LEGAL SUITE: « Taking into account the challenges faced by corporations aiming for better corporate governance, Legal Suite assists by offering them a tool that allows them to share information and advice between all department. Easily configurable, it offers diverse functions to optimize the management of contracts.”
Sodexho’s legal department implemented the Legal Suite to centralize their files and make it easier to follow-up on them and to report to management. This solution accessible by the intranet is used by 17 corporate counsels.
Wanting to centralize all the data which it manages, the legal department wanted to equip themselves with a tool that would help them report to directors. This need was accentuated with the arrival of the new legal requirements demanding more transparency with financial information. Until 2006 Sodexho’s corporate counsels essentially used Excel spreadsheets to keep track of their information. “This approach no longer applied to our centralized approach”, explains Eric Dupuis, Legal Director of the private sector. “We needed a tool that was easy to use with an excellent capability to be configured to our needs, capable to securely centralize our information in a database while keeping it easily accessible.”
In addition to the 20 legal counsels, the new solution needed to offer the ability to be consulted by the company’s department heads. After taking a look at what was on the market they chose Legal Suite’s solution in 2006. “The demonstration of their product captivated us from the very beginning and their team started work on this project very quickly”, confides Eric Dupuis.
Sodexho France chose to implement 4 Legal Suite modules: LS Contracts to manage their commercial contracts and keep up to date on deadlines with integrated alarms; LS Corporate to keep track of subsidiaries; LS Litigation to follow-up on their litigation activity and LS Real Estate to simplify the management of their commercial leases.
The benefits started showing after only a few months of usage: a better sharing of information, a better security of the data due to its centralization within one tool, increased vision of the follow-up of negotiations, etc. Having more than 4.000 contracts to manage, the corporate counsel’s work is largely simplified thanks to the user friendliness of the software. At Sodexho’s request, Legal Suite’s IT team created a new module called “Fiches-navette”, a kind of workflow between legal department heads and the company’s other department heads. The legal department enters its contracts or amendments by entering in a new file in the application which will be exchanged from department to department until the final approval. “This module which we are in the process of testing will enable us to be more reactive and gain more security”, explains Eric Dubuis.
For purposes of this website, all quotations have been translated into the English language