International payroll provider SD Worx used to manage its clause structure in Excel files and its template documents in MS Word. ClauseBase helped to centralise the management and updating of relevant clauses. This has given its lawyers room to identify and tackle new opportunities for better service delivery to its business users.
SD Worx is an international HR and payroll services provider, focusing on wage calculation and administration, social legislation and taxation compliance, and specialised software provision. The company is active in more than 150 countries and employs over 4.600 people worldwide, making it one of the largest HR services providers in Europe.
A core function of SD Worx’s corporate legal department is the drafting and negotiating of complex, bespoke agreements. A persistent issue that SD Worx experienced with this task was the centralised management and updating of relevant (fallback) clauses. SD Worx initially sought its solution in a specialised knowledge management platform, but this venture was not successful. After having witnessed ClauseBase in action, SD Worx realised it needed a central platform for both managing and deploying clauses and templates.
Anneleen Calliauw, senior legal counsel at the company, said:
"We previously managed our clause structure in Excel files and template documents in MS Word. This method of knowledge management caused the typical problems of those tools: the Excel files quickly became enormous, unwieldy collections of clauses and the MS Word files did little to speed up the drafting process and caused further problems with version management."
SD Worx trained two of its legal counsels in the advanced use of the ClauseBase software. Soon, the legal department had inventoried its entire range of company standard clauses, alternatives, fallbacks and optional clauses and was set to start producing these documents at increased efficiency.
Fabienne Lallemand, Chief Legal and Compliance Officer said:
“ClauseBase allows our in-house lawyers to centrally manage contracts and make them available in an intelligent, user-friendly way to colleagues who need them. In this way we streamline the operation between the legal department and the rest of the company and increase the quality of our documents.”
By training its own lawyers to automate documents with ClauseBase, SD Worx gave them the tools to identify other opportunities for improvement in the relationship between the legal department and the rest of the business. Before long, these in-house counsels had automated such documents as NDAs and settlement agreements in a Q&A-format, outsourcing document creation to business users while still ensuring quality and compliance with company policy.
With the help of ClauseBase, SD Worx has succeeded in centrally managing and deploying its contract knowledge and has given its lawyers room to identify and tackle new opportunities for better service delivery to its business users. In this way, the legal department has improved its internal efficiency and increased its status as a strategic partner to the different business units.
