Revenue lifecycle management company, Conga, and Big Four firm PwC in the UK, have launched a strategic alliance focused on legal ops. Central to this move is that PwC has integrated Conga into its new Legal Operations Portal (LOP), which helps legal teams manage, automate and optimise their workflows. They claim their LOP approach can cut legal teams’ external expenditure by up to 30%.
This significant cost saving is the result of access to ‘streamlined processes [that] boost productivity and decrease risk, create visibility and access to real time data, providing important insights which helps with resourcing allocation and strategic decision making’.
As part of this alliance, document automation tool, Conga Composer, and e-signature solution, Conga Sign, have both been integrated into the cloud-based LOP to automatically generate documents such as NDAs and MSAs and send them for signature. The LOP also, at least according to the PwC website, appears to be ‘built on Salesforce’. Below are some other aspects of what PwC’s LOP already does.
Klaus Schmidt, Global Tax & Legal Services Alliances Leader, PwC, said: ‘The collaboration between PwC’s Legal Operations Portal and Conga will enable a simplified and more streamlined legal intake process for our clients, helping them to digitally transform their operations.
‘With an increasingly demanding environment, our clients are under pressure to handle these matters with limited resources, so I am excited to see this partnership enable our people to help their clients by improving productivity, driving efficiency and increasing profitability.’
Grant Peterson, Chief Product Officer at Conga, said: ‘This agreement with PwC will be pivotal for the legal industry embracing digital transformation. From document management to eSignatures, our integrated solutions are crucial components in the Legal Operations Portal, providing legal professionals with complete control over their workflows, end-to-end. Combining this with the deep industry knowledge from PwC, we look forward to seeing legal teams take charge of their transformation programs.’
An interesting move and it is again another example of businesses in the legal sector partnering closely together to improve outcomes for the clients. Plus, it’s worth mentioning that Conga also has partnerships with Tata Consulting and Accenture.
On the 30% claim….well, that’s quite a big cost cut on law firm spending. Such savings may only really be possible if a legal team was sending out a high volume of lower value legal tasks to law firms to handle and really embraced a very thorough triaging approach to reduce that. But, for some companies this may be a realistic saving – not that many law firms will be celebrating that.
Either way, it’s further evidence of tech companies and consultants seeking to help corporates reduce their legal spend – at a time when the regulatory and compliance burden only ever seems to increase month by month, at least for larger companies. So, this will likely be welcome news to many GCs and heads of legal ops.
That said, many have been the attempts to improve the internal economics and workflows of inhouse legal teams, and many have been the attempts that didn’t go quite as planned. But, let’s see….maybe this one really changes things.