Curve: one Legal Function to rule them all
Curve is not a card. The Law Boutique isn’t an outsourced legal service. Here’s how we optimised Curve’s entire Legal function to make it a nexus of business information and driver of change.
“By the end of the process, we had a suite of bespoke, easy-to-use tools that allowed us to better manage our workload, save time and money and empower other business stakeholders. All this while maintaining the right level of control through a managed workflow process.” Alistair Houghton, General Counsel at Curve
About
Curve is an Over The Top banking platform that consolidates all bank cards into a single smart card and app. Curve raised a total of $75M with $55M raised in September 2019 spurring rapid headcount growth (from 80 to 200 within a year) and a high number of new contracts to negotiate with key partners, consultants and software solutions.
The Challenge
We set out to help the General Counsel and sole in-house lawyer with…
Ensuring the legal team had enough time to work on high value, strategic work
Keeping up with the business needs and rapid growth plans
Establishing a legal function that could deal with day to day business needs whilst remaining lean
What we did
Enter The Law Boutique, stage left.
Phase 1: Discovery
We interviewed key stakeholders to understand the culture, what tools were widely used in the business and what they really needed from their legal team. Time for some disruption.
Phase 2: Execution
Based on what we found during the discovery phase, we provided them with our platform which:
- Enabled stakeholders to interact with Legal through a central location and self-serve where possible (a ‘legal intranet page’)
- Automated NDAs
- Contained a contract database that contained key information and renewal alerts. Stakeholders just had to fill in a form with some basic details and the document was auto-created and sent for e-signature via DocuSign, all in one seamless action
- Generated reports and analytics
- Managed tasks and workload
- Implemented a ‘legal query’ ticketing system
- The result? An effective frontline and empowerment of other team members to take on tasks that would alleviate the workload of the legal team.
Phase 3: Ongoing support
Contract overflow support
To help alleviate workload, we took on all commercial contract reviews and simple legal queries that came from the business leaving the in-house Legal team with time to drive growth. Like it should do.
The result
In short: we simplified Curve’s entire legal function and took on some of the heavy lifting with our outsourced contract management & review service. This enabled it to work smarter, more efficiently and power business growth. The benefits were felt by the entire company.
- 1Stakeholders found the new self-serve contract process easier than requesting third-party NDAs. This reduced overall incoming Legal requests by around 25%
- 2Requests were streamlined and business stakeholders had more visibility, increasing transparency and trust in the legal team
- 3Legal workload became manageable and all parties had visibility over the process
- 4Our contract database alerts saved the company £30K through notifying people to terminate obsolete agreements. The risk of renewing unwanted contracts was removed.
- 5Analytics revealed which teams submit the most contracts, as well as the types of contracts Legal was spending most of its time reviewing. This enabled them to make decisions about which contracts to invest in creating internal templates for and which to build cheat-sheets for and automate as well as what training to prioritise.
Try it for yourself
If your Legal function needs optimising, we can make it happen. The Law Boutique swaps inefficiency for streamlining and repetition for automation, helping you operate better.
We offer everything from DPO as a service to financial regulatory support to strategic consultancy to help Legal work better.
Get in touch today – wave goodbye to your old ways.
