Global Beverage Company Unifies Legal Operations

As a global beverage company operating across multiple jurisdictions, the organization's legal department faced mounting operational challenges that threatened efficiency across their distributed legal organization. With lawyers spread across numerous affiliates and regions worldwide, the team struggled to maintain visibility into workload distribution and performance metrics. Managers had no way to understand team capacity, allocate work effectively, or track matter types and volumes by jurisdiction.

Knowledge management gaps created particularly acute pain points. Legal teams across different jurisdictions were reinventing solutions that may have already existed elsewhere in the organization, leading to duplicated effort and inconsistent approaches. Without a centralized legal knowledge repository, the company couldn't efficiently share legal precedents and expertise across their global footprint. Document management remained manual and time-consuming, with routine requests requiring repeated drafting from scratch rather than leveraging existing work product.

Collaboration with external counsel lacked structure and systematic approaches. The legal department had no consistent way to manage document sharing, track milestones, or control access across complex, multi-jurisdictional matters. Translation management across multiple languages added administrative burden without AI support, while the absence of systematic case tracking meant no clear visibility into matter progress, deadlines, or key dates.

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The legal transformation team knew they needed more than point solutions—they required an integrated platform that could address their complex, multi-jurisdictional requirements while supporting sophisticated access controls around legal privilege. The evaluation criteria focused on several critical capabilities.

First, the solution needed to provide comprehensive visibility into legal operations, enabling managers to understand workload distribution, track matter types and volumes by jurisdiction, and establish meaningful performance metrics. Knowledge management was equally critical—the platform had to support efficient sharing of legal precedents and expertise across jurisdictions, building a searchable legal knowledge repository that would eliminate duplication of effort.

The technical requirements were sophisticated. The legal team needed granular access controls that could support team-based permissions beyond simple affiliate-based structures, with the ability to mark matters as confidential and restrict metadata visibility where legal privilege demanded it. The solution had to support virtual team structures spanning multiple affiliates, manage external counsel lifecycle (including automatic removal when matters close), and integrate seamlessly with Outlook for matter creation, plus offer robust multi-language translation support.

Equally important was finding a vendor partner who valued pragmatism over complexity, could provide best practices from other global implementations, and would support a phased, learning-based approach to deployment. The legal team was explicitly seeking to avoid over-engineered custom solutions in favor of leveraging proven platform capabilities.

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The legal transformation team's decision to expand their Leah relationship from contract lifecycle management to matter management reflected both confidence in the existing partnership and the platform's unique ability to address their sophisticated requirements. Having already contracted for CLM implementation, the organization recognized the strategic value of platform consolidation—managing both contracts and matters within a single, integrated ecosystem.

The matter management platform's technical capabilities aligned precisely with the company's complex requirements. The solution offered the granular access controls necessary to manage legal privilege across multi-jurisdictional teams, supporting team-based permissions beyond simple organizational hierarchies. The platform could mark matters as confidential with restricted metadata visibility, automatically segregate between legal team users and business users, and support virtual team structures spanning multiple affiliates—critical for their hub-and-spoke legal organization model.

External counsel management capabilities addressed a key pain point, with automated user lifecycle management that removes external users when matters close and restricts their ability to invite additional users without legal team oversight. Native Outlook integration would enable matter creation directly from email inquiries, while the platform's AI-powered translation support and integration with their existing CLM deployment promised operational efficiency across their global footprint.

Beyond technical capabilities, Leah partnership approach proved decisive. The vendor's responsiveness to complex requirements, willingness to share best practices from other global implementations, and support for a pragmatic, phased deployment strategy aligned with the legal transformation philosophy. The legal transformation team valued avoiding over-customization, instead leveraging proven platform functionality that other organizations had validated.

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