By Sebastian Goldsmith, General Counsel, Medigold Health.
Case Study Overview
Medigold Health is one of the UK’s largest and most trusted Occupational Health and Workplace Wellbeing companies. They provide services to organisations across the UK, from FTSE100 companies to SMEs to public sector bodies, covering over two million workers across the UK.
The biggest challenges a new legal team in a well-established business faces are visibility, reach and resources. Legal counsels often have to wear many hats and end up doing lots of the day-to-day legal work, meaning there’s less time to focus on the strategy and macro-risk management of the business.
Given that I deal with at least a handful of contracts per day, between 3 and 150 pages depending on the counterparty, reducing the amount of time I have to spend inside them is really important. Definely is extremely intuitive, easy to use and allows me to send out more accurate contracts in a fraction of the time.
Medigold Health Goal
As the business has been on a journey of constant innovation and growth, my focus is to place Legal and Compliance at the centre of the business. In my previous organisation, I learned that there is no better team to be the risk guardians and strategic advisors of the business. We are the only department that touches every aspect of the business in detail, and therefore I am keen to cement that culture within Medigold Health too.
I am responsible for certain strategic goals falling under the ‘World Class Standards’ objective of our corporate strategy. Our business was founded with quality at its core, and we hold a number of essential accreditations, so it is vital we maintain this philosophy as we grow. A huge part of this at the moment is implementing Legal and Compliance tech, so that we can more efficiently and effectively set and monitor KPIs across what is now a large business.
The Challenge
As a new legal team in a well-established business, visibility and reach can be a challenge.
The other challenge as a new department is resource (in terms of spend, personnel and time), again which is why I am trying to use what resources I have to make us more efficient via tech, as it will free up time.
Sole legal counsels inevitably get bogged down in day-to-day legal work, whereas the GC role should be mainly about the strategy and macro-risk management of the business. It is really hard to do that when you are spending time dragged into low-value work like proofing and searching for definitions. It impacts everyone as I would then become a bottleneck, which is the opposite of my objective.
I’m also dyslexic, which means the chances of missing something are greater than zero (even if I have trained myself over the years to be fairly eagle-eyed), so any help with that is essentially a reasonable adjustment.
How has Definely helped you relieve your challenges and achieve your objectives?
I first came across Definely at Legal Geek 2021 and just thought ‘That’s genius, I have to have it.’ Fortunately, my CFO was similarly wowed, and I think the value for money is excellent.
The impact that Definely had on my work and the business was felt immediately. It’s highly intuitive and very easy to use and, as a result, we are sending out more accurate contracts and I feel more comfortable that I have spotted everything. It speeds up my productivity and reduces the aforementioned bottleneck. On conference calls it is a lifesaver and saves frantic scrolling – you can even pull in definitions across multiple related documents.
When the new tool Definely Proof launched I snapped that up too because it saves enormous amounts of time and fixes issues in your documents for you with a single click for each (even where definitions are out of alphabetical order) and provides a sense check on references, figures and key dates.
It spots anything that looks like a leftover placeholder (square brackets, highlights, underlines etc.) and for the truly obsessive, it even tells you when you have used a definition before it has been defined (e.g. in the Recitals).
What was your team’s process before using Definely?
Before Definely, my alternate solution was my brain, and it didn’t work because I have two kids under 5, no time and dyslexia!
We would be scrolling endlessly and using the search function A LOT. Corrections were manual and took ten times longer, and things were inevitably missed. Drafts were going out less polished than I would have liked or taking too much time to go out perfectly.
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