In 2018 and 2019, the Airbus Legal and Compliance Agile Commercial Team (ACT) launched an initiative to transform its legal service delivery model to bring more value to Airbus and its customers. Airbus outlined five primary expectations for ACT as they underwent this transformation:
- Be more business-minded and timely in delivering legal services.
- Improve anticipation of risks and mitigation.
- Be an active contributor to complex business decisions and design of new business models.
- Be more consistent in advice across regions and business areas.
- Leverage digital tools.
Prior to September 2019, there was no central intake hub to manage these requests or evaluate the relative priority and impact of the legal work. Nor was there any formal mechanism to track requests, which came to the team through many channels. There was no easy way to categorize, prioritize, assign and track the work. This unstructured process caused unnecessary work, a lack of transparency into legal service requests, inconsistent advice, duplication of effort and no actionable insights.
To address these challenges, Airbus, in partnership with UnitedLex, implemented a digital workflow tool for legal service requests, called Ask Legal.
In less than a month, the team built and deployed the centralized platform. Components of the tool included business-focused request forms and centralized intake, risk-based triage, file collaboration, and automated routing and notifications
This story was published in Today’s General Counsel. To read more, visit Transforming Legal Service Delivery
