A Global Pharmaceutical Company Centralizes 120,000+ Contracts Across 60+ Countries with Leah
Sandoz, a major global pharmaceutical company with operations spanning more than 60 countries and approximately 22,000 employees, faced a critical contract management crisis following its separation from Novartis. The organization's 120,000+ contracts were fragmented across multiple legacy platforms including SAP CLM, SharePoint repositories, G-drives, and country-specific systems like the Tomorrow platform in France. This fragmentation created significant operational challenges across the pharmaceutical giant's complex global structure.
Contracts scattered across multiple legacy systems requiring centralization and standardization
Operating with fragmented contract repositories and inconsistent processes
Automated contract generation capabilities across global operations
“Template training was super beneficial because now we understand how to generate templates and automate contract creation processes.”
Manager Legal & Compliance Strategy and Operations
Challenge
Sandoz, a major global pharmaceutical company with operations spanning more than 60 countries and approximately 22,000 employees, faced a critical contract management crisis following its separation from Novartis. The organization's 120,000+ contracts were fragmented across multiple legacy platforms including SAP CLM, SharePoint repositories, G-drives, and country-specific systems like the Tomorrow platform in France. This fragmentation created significant operational challenges across the pharmaceutical giant's complex global structure.
Legacy contracts lacked structured metadata across 15-20 mandatory fields critical for pharmaceutical compliance, making them virtually unsearchable and unmanageable across jurisdictions. With varying legal requirements spanning French legal forms, German entities, and U.S. regulations, the company needed sophisticated contract governance capabilities that its scattered systems simply couldn't provide.
Template creation remained manual and inconsistent across countries, with France alone requiring nine different automated templates featuring complex conditional logic based on jurisdictional requirements. The lack of standardization created compliance risks and operational inefficiencies that scaled with the company's global footprint. Manual contract signing processes introduced growing operational risk as agreement volumes increased across the separated entity.
Solution Search
Sandoz selected Leah as their global CLM platform to replace the fragmented legacy infrastructure. The pharmaceutical company required a comprehensive solution capable of handling complex multi-jurisdictional requirements while providing the flexibility to accommodate country-specific compliance needs within a unified global framework.
The platform's AI-powered capabilities offered automatic metadata extraction across the 15-20 mandatory fields required for pharmaceutical compliance, eliminating the massive manual data entry burden that would have otherwise accompanied the migration of 120,000+ historical contracts. This intelligent document processing proved essential for making legacy contracts immediately searchable and actionable within the new centralized repository.
Leah template automation engine provided the sophisticated conditional logic required for pharmaceutical contracting across multiple jurisdictions. The system could automatically adjust contract clauses, legal entity information, and governance requirements based on value thresholds, geographic location, and regulatory frameworks—capabilities critical for a company operating under French, German, U.S., and dozens of other legal systems simultaneously.
The platform's enterprise integration capabilities enabled consolidation of contracts from disparate source systems while maintaining proper data governance and access controls across the global organization. SSO integration supported the company's post-separation identity infrastructure, while flexible user role configurations accommodated complex hybrid access requirements where team members needed visibility into both country-specific contracts and global functional agreements.
The cognitive search and reporting capabilities validated against the full 120,000-contract dataset provided the pharmaceutical company with unprecedented visibility into their global contract portfolio, enabling compliance tracking and obligation management at enterprise scale.
“Leah eliminated our need for separate negotiation tools. Having everything in one platform makes much more sense.”
Senior Manager Legal Operations
Implementation
The implementation journey began with a comprehensive data migration strategy addressing contracts scattered across SAP CLM, SharePoint, the Tomorrow platform in France, and numerous other repositories. The organization invested in thorough change management, developing detailed 22-page admin manuals and conducting multi-timezone training sessions to support their global user base.
The pharmaceutical company adopted a phased regional rollout approach, beginning with pilot deployments before expanding to full production across all countries. This staged methodology allowed the implementation team to identify and resolve technical challenges—including SSO configuration complexities following the Novartis separation and sophisticated role permission structures for hybrid access requirements—before scaling globally.
France represented a particularly complex migration, transitioning from the Tomorrow platform with 10 established automated templates that required immediate recreation in Leah. The implementation team conducted intensive three-day workshops focused on advanced template configuration, ensuring the country team could replicate and enhance their existing automation capabilities within the new platform.
The global implementation required careful coordination across legal, procurement, and business functions, with dedicated workstreams managing user onboarding, template configuration, and ongoing data migration. Weekly synchronization meetings maintained alignment across regional teams while monthly business reviews tracked adoption metrics and addressed deployment challenges.
Vendor partnership proved critical to implementation success, with responsive customer success support providing hands-on configuration assistance, troubleshooting technical issues, and adapting approaches based on lessons learned from each deployment wave. The implementation team provided weekly configuration sessions, extensive training programs, and ad-hoc support to ensure regional administrators could effectively support their local user communities.
Outcome
Sandoz successfully migrated 120,000+ contracts into a centralized, searchable repository, eliminating the operational chaos of scattered legacy systems. The pharmaceutical company now maintains complete visibility into their global contract portfolio with structured metadata enabling compliance tracking, obligation management, and strategic reporting capabilities that were previously impossible.
The organization onboarded 1,300+ users across different access levels spanning admin, legal, and business licenses, creating a unified contract management ecosystem across all 60+ countries of operation. This consolidated approach replaced the fragmented country-specific platforms that had created inconsistencies and visibility gaps across the global organization.
Template automation transformed contract generation across the pharmaceutical company's global operations. Teams can now generate fully compliant agreements with just a few clicks, with the platform automatically incorporating the appropriate legal language, jurisdictional requirements, and governance clauses based on contract parameters. This automation spans simple NDAs covering all 60+ countries to complex multi-jurisdictional licensing agreements with sophisticated conditional logic.
"Our Leah production instance is super fast and performs beautifully. The performance improvement over our previous SharePoint-based system is remarkable."
— Senior Manager Legal Operations
The centralized platform enables global standardization while maintaining necessary jurisdictional flexibility, ensuring compliance with varying regulatory requirements across French, German, U.S., and other legal frameworks. Regional teams access country-specific templates and contracts while maintaining visibility into global agreements relevant to their operations.
The pharmaceutical company has positioned itself for continued transformation and scaling. With the foundational centralization complete and template automation deployed, the organization can now focus on advanced capabilities including enhanced AI-powered contract intelligence, expanded workflow automation across business functions, and deeper integration with enterprise systems.
"Uploading approved templates to the platform will generate huge impact because users can generate agreements with just a few clicks across all our global operations."
— Senior Manager Legal Operations
The successful implementation demonstrates that even the most complex global pharmaceutical organizations can achieve contract centralization and intelligent automation at enterprise scale, transforming fragmented manual processes into streamlined, compliant, and strategically valuable contract management capabilities.
