The Challenge
The Legal Department at AES encountered specific challenges related to procurement processes:
- Lack of insights: the Legal department worked hard on producing quality clauses and templates. But it’s hard to tell if the Word templates are actually being used. This posed a significant risk of outdated contracts being signed.
- Template management: when teams draft contracts at the scale and volume that AES does, consistency and efficiency are key. Yet with many different templates and many different legal or commercial options within them, that was no easy task.
- Alignment of Legal team: Coordinating a team of 170 legal professionals to share best drafting practices, align on standard clauses, and adopt the same template material is tricky to say the least.
The Solution
To address these challenges, AES adopted the full ClauseBase suite, consisting of ClauseBuddy and Clause9 with the following focal points:
- Centralized Legal Content: ClauseBuddy was utilized to centralize legal content and standardize clauses, providing a unified, multi-lingual clause library accessible to the entire legal team.
- Self-service platform for procurement : Clause9 was implemented to provide a self-service platform for all the procurement team’s legal drafting needs. Legal is no longer perceived as a bottleneck and Procurement works with automated templates that are guaranteed to be up to date, reducing risk for the entire business.
The Result
The combined power of Clause9 and ClauseBuddy soon showed its advantages:
- Legal as template architects: instead of trying to juggle hundreds of assignments, the legal department now enables the business to self-serve contract creation with significantly diminished risk of errors.
- Streamlined Template Usage: AES is able to produce its documents at a fraction of the time it used to cost and with guaranteed quality.
- Templates as source of clauses: through the clause-based approach of Clause9 automation, each of the clauses included in the automated templates are also made available in ClauseBuddy’s quality library.
Raquel Rodriguez, Associate General Counsel at AES, stated: “We trialled ClauseBase’s suite of legal drafting tools for a few months before rolling out to the entire organisation.
During that time, we saw that Clause9 is an incredibly powerful document automation tool that can make it easy for our colleagues to draft highly tailored documents at scale. Thanks to ClauseBuddy, we now also have a shared brain of legal drafting knowledge along with a range of other tools that help our lawyers drafter better and faster.
With the way that the two tools mesh together seamlessly, the decision to choose ClauseBase was an obvious one.”
