Taming the Complexity of Multi-party
Contract Review and Approval

 

mot-r m logo (red square)-03 mot-r deployed by global investment leader

Case Study - Circle Arrows - Yellow 4-21-2025 v1.0.1

needed: standardized, automated, scalable CONTRACT workflows

Context

The focus of this case study is the contracts department within a large financial services firm. This firm is one of the world’s largest financial services organizations. It has leading levels of assets under management—serving pension funds, corporate pensions, family offices, healthcare, insurance, and other financial institutions. The core, mission-critical function of this department is the creation, due diligence, and approval/rejection of contract terms with its growing list of over 2000 fund distribution partners.

Challenges

The contract department’s day-to-day processes are complex and exacting — involving internal and external professionals from legal, risk, operations, finance, compliance, and audit functions. The team executes several thousand of contracts per year—with over 400 active contract reviews on any given day. Who is involved and what they are responsible for is dictated by the product being sold, business units involved, country, and organizational reporting structures. As such, the group’s multiple workflows include a wide variety of clients and participants—from internal contract team members to regulatory and management personnel.

Adding fuel to the fire, implementation of a solution to deal with this complexity was a high priority for two reasons:

current Software End of Life

The custom, in-house-developed workflow and reporting solution the team relied on was coming to the end of its technological life span, otherwise known as “End of Life-ing.” The technologies surrounding it were no longer supported or verified for security.

New DMS Roll Out

The firm had chosen a new document management platform and was rolling it out organization-wide. Technologically, the contract department’s aging service support system would not integrate with this new DMS.

 

Complicating Considerations

Increasing Demands, Constrained Resources

As experienced by many in legal, fewer people are being pressured to do more and more work. However, the work they do still needs to meet the highest standards.

Justification of Budgeting and Staffing

Under normal conditions it was difficult to get a solid view of what was being done at any point of time, and what needs to be done. Robust daily, and defined-period tracking, reporting and analytics is required to quantify department workloads and underpin personnel budgeting decisions.

Maintaining Security

Given the elevated fiduciary responsibility of the firm, its IT practices require any software solution to pass a security vetting and to integrate with its federated identity structure.

 

Objectives

 

Replace the Old System

A new system at a minimum would need to provide similar functionality.

 

Improve Upon its Shortcomings

Any opportunity to improve on the limitations of the old system—and add enhancements already identified would be ideal.

 

Integrate with the New DMS

Given the document-centric nature of the contracting processes, seamless integration with the DMS was essential.

 

Adhere to Security Protocols

Any solution must retain the strict security of the current corporate system.

 

Enhance reporting and analytics

Improved ability to track, measure, and report on contract department activities.

 

 

 

 

 

Case Study - Circle Arrows - Blues - 4-21-2025 v1.0.0

solution: legal work orchestration

 

mot-r | met and Exceeded objectives

mot-r, meeting and exceeding the contract department’s objectives, was chosen to replace the old solution and to surmount the other challenges. It proved its excellent reputation for being highly capable and extremely well integrated with their DMS—furthermore, it preserved single-sign-on security of the firm’s network.

  1. Start small, and deliver meaningful results in 30-60 days. Guaranteed. Zero Risk.
  2. Multipurpose Legal Work Orchestration: Scalable across workflows, departments, countries, languages and processes providing you with compounding returns on your investment.
  3. Scale-up in sync with your needs, knowledge and capabilities over time.
  4. Highly customizable: Tailored like a custom solution without custom cost, risk or delay.
  5. Document-centric: Extends DMS capabilities without duplicating documents or breaking security.
  6. Evidence-based design: Applying the well-known science of high-performance operating practices.
  7. Built to Adapt: Easily adapting to personnel, management, strategic, operational and technological changes you will inevitably confront.
  8. No-code Changes and Maintenance: Business users can maintain the system without IT support.
  9. Audit-ready: Produces audit-quality reports easily.
  10. Software with Service: We are your extended team when you need us.

mot-r_LegalWorkOrchestration

 

 

Why Competitive Offerings Were Rejected

Duplicate Documents & System Expenses

Unlike mot-r, all competitive CLM solutions on the market require documents to be copied from the existing DMS repository to a separate, second repository just for the CLM. This destroys the single source of truth for documents, negates established DMS security, creates confusion for users, and diminishes the returns on the investment made in the DMS implementation.

mot-r is the only offering which keeps the documents inside the DMS and maintains their security. No duplicates.

Rigid Workgroups Structure

Other solutions provided CLM-specific functionality but could not address the enormous variations in approval groups across products, business units and locations.

mot-r is capable of handling an unlimited number of unique approval groups which can be made up of internal clients, internal management and audit and even external counsel or advisors.

Incapable of Adapting

Given the size and complexity of the organization, constant changes occur in personnel, roles and responsibilities which have to be reflected in all workflows.

mot-r was designed to keep pace with the scope of work changes required by legal, and the inevitable corporate changes that happen around them. Personnel, Management, Reporting, Strategic, Technological and Operational changes can all be handled by mot-r with no downtime and no cost.

High Support & Maintenance Costs

Competitive solutions required "certified administrators" and constant IT oversight. Driving up the maintenance burden and ensuring that any changes required would take weeks and cause downtime for the contract team.

mot-r is a no-code, highly customizable solution. It requires no ongoing IT resources for support or maintenance. Business users can support, maintain, and enhance the solution with no special skills; just point and click. No downtime and no cost.

 

 

 

PARTNERS & ADVISORS: 25 YEARS OF ENTERPRISE SOLUTION EXPERIENCE

mot-r logo 72dpi 3-15-2022 v1.0-10

The team behind mot-r has been designing, developing, and implementing cloud-based service solutions for over 25 years. In fact, since 1994, our team has been continuously building and deploying enterprise-grade, “cloud-based” solutions (which was called “the web” back in the day).

We don’t believe in delivering a product with known bugs or deficiencies. Our support ticket queue routinely contains no tickets. And while the implementation failure rate of most legal tech solutions is over 75%, our success rate is over 95%.

We believe that growth shouldn’t be our primary pursuit. We don’t follow the VC/PE doctrine of looking at our customers as a wallet from which to extract funds. By contrast, our focus is continuously improving the lives of the people we serve. And in that way, we will all win.