Why an Aesthetics and Neuroscience Pharmaceutical Company Chose Leah to Scale Legal Operations Through 30% Pandemic Growth
An aesthetics and neuroscience pharmaceutical company, a diversified German pharmaceuticals and aesthetics company with approximately 5,000 employees operating globally across 28-29 countries, faced an unexpected operational crisis born from extraordinary success. The aesthetics business experienced exceptional pandemic growth—achieving a 30% growth rate in the first year due to the 'Zoom effect' as people seeing themselves on video calls sought aesthetic treatments. The company grew so rapidly they couldn't supply enough product to meet demand.
Year-over-year growth rate in aesthetics business driven by pandemic demand
Contract records requiring migration from inadequate legacy system
Analytics capability to answer basic portfolio questions
Challenge
An aesthetics and neuroscience pharmaceutical company, a diversified German pharmaceuticals and aesthetics company with approximately 5,000 employees operating globally across 28-29 countries, faced an unexpected operational crisis born from extraordinary success. The aesthetics business experienced exceptional pandemic growth—achieving a 30% growth rate in the first year due to the 'Zoom effect' as people seeing themselves on video calls sought aesthetic treatments. The company grew so rapidly they couldn't supply enough product to meet demand.
This growth trajectory created severe operational strain in legal operations. The distributed legal teams totaling 56+ employees across therapeutics, life care, aesthetics, and the holding company found their manual processes couldn't keep pace with business scale. What worked at smaller volumes became critical bottlenecks.
Contract templates had become 'a mess'—scattered everywhere and nowhere, with no centralized template management. Employees frequently used outdated versions because current versions weren't accessible or clearly identified. This created risk exposure from outdated legal language, inefficiency from recreating templates, and inconsistency as different business units used different versions of the same agreement types.
Significant manual work involved duplicate data entry between systems. Users had to enter vendor information into SAP, then separately copy the same information into the contract system—creating wasted time, transcription errors, and data inconsistencies between systems. The organization couldn't answer basic portfolio questions like 'how many NDAs do we have' or understand contract composition by type, business unit, or counterparty. Legal leadership operated blind without portfolio insights.
The legacy contract system from EFL provided only basic contract archiving and renewal reminders with no advanced capabilities—functioning as a document repository rather than a contract lifecycle management platform. With aggressive growth ambitions continuing, the organization faced a stark choice: massively expand legal headcount proportionally with business growth, or invest in technology to enable the same team to handle increased volume.
Solution Search
An aesthetics and neuroscience pharmaceutical company's legal operations leadership evaluated contract lifecycle management platforms with specific requirements driven by their scaling challenges. They needed a solution capable of handling 15,000 contract migration from the legacy system while supporting distributed teams across multiple countries and business units.
The evaluation focused on four critical capabilities that would determine success:
Operational efficiency was paramount. The business case required demonstrating how technology investment would enable continued growth without proportional support function expansion—the 'doing more with less' narrative essential for approval from the financially sophisticated COO (a former investment banker who scrutinized numbers carefully) and CEO. The target: achieve 10%+ efficiency gains to avoid 15+ incremental legal hires over three years by automating high-volume contract types where legal used their own templates: NDAs, MSAs, PSAs, distribution agreements, and DPAs.
Visibility and centralization topped the requirements. They needed to establish a single source of truth for all contracts, templates, and clauses across the entire organization—eliminating template chaos by providing one authoritative location for current versions and ensuring legal language consistency.
Analytics and reporting capabilities were non-negotiable. The platform needed to enable portfolio analytics to answer basic questions about contract composition, risk exposure, and counterparty relationships—moving from blind operation to data-driven decision making.
Enterprise integration was critical for workflow efficiency. The solution had to eliminate duplicate data entry through integration with SAP for vendor master data synchronization and DocuSign for execution workflow, enabling contract data to flow to downstream systems like Ariba contract workspaces automatically.
The organization needed enterprise-grade scalability to support continued growth, robust template management and clause library functionality, workflow automation and approval routing, and the architectural flexibility to work with their transitioning integration middleware from SAP Process Orchestrator to Cloud Integration Gateway.
Why Leah
An aesthetics and neuroscience pharmaceutical company selected Leah based on its ability to address all four strategic pillars while providing the enterprise scale and integration capabilities required for their complex technical environment.
The platform's contract repository and migration capabilities could handle the 15,000 contract migration scope across the company Therapeutics, the company Group holding operations, and EMEA aesthetics business units. This provided confidence that the solution could manage the distributed contract portfolio at scale.
The template management and clause library functionality directly solved the template chaos challenge. Leah would provide centralized control over template versions, ensuring employees always accessed current legal language and enabling the legal team to maintain consistency across business units and geographies.
Workflow automation and approval routing capabilities would streamline high-volume contract types, enabling the efficiency gains required to avoid proportional headcount expansion. By automating routine NDAs, MSAs, PSAs, and distribution agreements, the legal team could focus on complex negotiations and strategic matters.
The platform's analytics and reporting capabilities would finally provide portfolio visibility—enabling legal leadership to understand contract composition, track obligations, identify risk patterns, and make data-driven resource allocation decisions.
Critically, Leah’s enterprise integration architecture could connect with SAP for vendor master data synchronization, DocuSign for execution workflow, and Ariba to push finalized contract details to contract workspaces enabling purchase-to-pay processes. This would eliminate duplicate manual data entry and create seamless workflows from contract creation through execution to procurement processes. The platform's flexibility to work with either customer middleware or Leah’s Jitterbit integration platform accommodated the company's evolving technical architecture.
The solution provided multi-language and multi-country support essential for global operations, with the scalability to support continued aggressive growth across the six asset classes (therapeutics, aesthetics, life care, financial investments, private markets, and real estate).
With a Big Four firm engaged as implementation consulting partner and a comprehensive on-site implementation workshop planned, the company positioned Leah as the technology foundation enabling their legal operations to scale efficiently alongside continued business growth—transforming from manual, siloed processes to an automated, integrated, data-driven contract management capability.
