About

Anneliese Reinhold, general counsel and senior vice president of EITC (trading as du), relates that her personal motto “onwards and upwards” is one that is shared by the company’s legal team whole-heartedly. Constantly striving to assist the company to achieve its strategic goals through collaborative engagement, it has achieved exceptional results within the business for its service delivery. ‘While the job is by no means entirely about people pleasing’, Reinhold explains, ‘we recently received a 93% positive customer satisfaction rate for interaction with the legal department, which was the best result we have ever achieved’. Clearly, this is an indication of a team operating at a very high level of performance. This is just as well, as it has been required to be at the sharp end of a major ramping-up of the company’s operations recently. ‘The company is maturing’, Reinhold explains, ‘and as such we are seeing more specific transactions requiring bespoke contract negotiations as opposed to the standard arrangements we had as a start-up. We are also taking on a far greater volume of compliance-related work than we were previously’. To assist with this expanded role, du’s 14-person legal team has looked into rolling out a number of efficiency improvements aimed at automating certain roles to free up individuals for more intellectually intensive tasks. ‘We have introduced a self-service contract automation tool for standard non-disclosure agreements which has been very good’, says Reinhold, ‘and has freed up bandwidth within the team. We are also working with our digital team to utilise a robotic process automation tool, and have identified a number of processes that this tool could help with. Essentially we are trying to liberate staff from data entry type activities so that they can assist on more strategic projects that have real value for the business’.