Culture and a strong company-wide network can only go so far. Giving full-service clients the benefit of a firm-wide expertise requires sophisticated yet easy-to-use data.
That is what we brought to the role of Chief Legal Advisor to Heineken UK, allowing us to provide not only an insightful view of our work with the company, but also new insights across Heineken UK’s business.
challenge
We are chief legal advisers to Heineken UK, which is a huge responsibility and a rare challenge. How can we ensure that Heineken UK can leverage our full range of expertise, from traditional legal services to technology-enabled managed legal services? How can we ensure that we meet all of a company’s needs?
Beyond that, how can we leverage the unique insights that being a leading legal supplier provides to help Heineken UK understand itself better, anticipate opportunities and risks, and respond to them faster than ever before?
solution
Of course, our existing processes, technical capabilities, internal networks and business practices support this. But we wanted to do more, so we built technology to extract data from many systems and deliver a set of concise, easy-to-use, commercially focused, technology-enabled dashboards for Heineken UK’s legal and operations teams.
This approach also provides Heineken UK’s legal director with a central view of the status of all the many workstreams involved, highlighting progress against expected volumes and KPIs, and enabling a real-time, at-a-glance assessment of the position across the relationship.
This way of managing and visualizing data at this scale was new to us and to Heineken UK.
result
Using dashboards, Heineken UK can now see at-a-glance visibility of resources, spend and progress against goals across five work streams, enabling accurate budget and resource management.
But they’ve done more than that. Dashboards provided Heineken UK with insights into their business that they wouldn’t have gotten otherwise.
Due to a sudden spike in some type of legal activity, we needed to review and assess the situation to understand if there was a potential risk. However, upon investigation, it was only Heineken UK’s own activity that increased in relation to the reporting deadline. We worked together to identify the potential issue and quickly realized it was a management concern rather than a serious underlying issue.
In Heineken UK’s property portfolio, they could immediately see the status of each issue in real-time, including which lease negotiations were stalled and whether the issue was between them and their tenants. This gives us visibility across our assets to understand what is preventing a quick resolution, allowing us to refine our processes to increase efficiency and accelerate transactions.
This allows Heineken UK and Pinsent Masons to work together to identify trends and issues earlier than before, and identify problems that would never have been visible in the past. This enables Heineken UK to allocate legal resources to the right issues at the right time in a way that was not possible before.
