Team size: Two

Could you share an example of a time when you came up with an innovation that improved how your legal team works and did not come at a large expense?

The processes for claims management were very inefficient, error-prone and faced a miscommunication risk. In the past, this also meant that many issues were not correctly assessed from a legal perspective, because information was missing or incomplete. This led to legal disputes that could have been avoided.

I decided to change this process and make it simpler, more efficient and less error prone by setting up a committee – that now meets every three weeks – presenting the cases and discussing how to proceed. Consequently, the affected departments have less work, reduced inefficiencies, and miscommunication, as the committee discusses exactly what next steps the respective departments are to take.

This has not only saved us costs, but we are now also quicker with the closure of cases. The change in process has not cost the company any money and has made the legal department much more efficient because the needed documents no longer have to be constantly requested.

Apart from legal matters, has the team worked on other company initiatives?

Corporate social responsibility is very important to the company. In line with this, the team drafted a clause for new contracts which is now implemented in all standard contracts.

Can you sum up the team culture/ethos in one sentence? 

The legal team operates as a high-performing team with a lot of empathy.

Prior to this, the team worked inefficiently and always answered colleagues’ questions in ‘legal language’ that a non-lawyer would find difficult to understand. As a result, queries were very often repeated, which took a lot of time.

The team started to take time to empathise with the person asking the question and gradually understood that it makes much more sense – and is more efficient – to put themselves in the person’s shoes and answer the question simply, with examples from everyday life. As a result, there were fewer queries, and colleagues could also work with the answer.