- Sector: Steelworks
- Employees: 2500
The problem
The legal department of a large industrial group is organized by a manager and a number of lawyers, that manage the individual paperwork at their workstations.
At the beginning of the collaboration, the operating procedure was to feed an Excel sheet “manually”, based on information provided by referents of each dossier, typically via email. In this way they kept track of the advacement of times and costs of the paperwork.
Every single lawyer could independently manage his paperwork, reporting on text files or self-product Access databases, information on major events. The documentation associated with the dossier was fully printed and, in part, stored on PC folders, or maintained within the email accounts of each lawyer.
The criticality was linked to the fact that there was not a system that could centrally manage requests, monitor the status of fulfillment of these, the progress of paperwork and related costs for fees and external consultings. Since everything was made manually, the risks were mainly related to the loss of information, the slowness in processing paperwork and the loss of time due to errors and redundancies.
The solution: Globe
Together with the legal department and thanks to the tools made available by Globe we designed and implemented an integrated working environment, complete with work-flow for the control of activities.
Today the head of the Office is able to receive requests from various companies/internal departments, to open new paperwork and dispatch them to the lawyers of the department. The activities are kept under constant control, in terms of processing times, through a graphical dashboard of the work assigned internally and externally. For these activities, the received proforma invoices for the work of external consultants can be managed in a controlled way, with the accounting for every single practice of the relevant costs.
Each report is made in “real time”: the head of the Office is so up to date for each dossier, which shows the fundamental data, the chronological history of all recorded significant events, the list of documents associated with the paperwork and an accounting summary table for “give and take.”
Another important element is that each lawyer continues to have an independent work environment, but synchronized with the rest of the system. Simple to use, it allows with a few clicks to record historical information, archive documents, send documents directly via Globe and enter deadlines for activities, feeding a personal “to do list”.
Advantages of the solution
The system was developed in order to ensure absolute security and data access control: each lawyer can see only his dossiers and can operate only on documents and information to which it has specific permissions.
In this way the company gets a synchronization of information but does not negate each team member the opportunity to organize his workflow, and then share data with the rest of the group and responsible in total safety and efficacy.
