About

Team size: 90

Major legal advisers: Bird & Bird, Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner, Eversheds Sutherland, Kemp Little, Shoosmiths, Simmons & Simmons

Redesigning a legal team so that it can deliver services to support a B2B IT services provider operating in a competitive market is no easy task. As cloud-based consulting continues to disrupt the way in which IT companies provide client services, DXC Technology’s legal department decided it needed to embrace new technology to get to market faster.

For the legal team, this has led to a mass overhaul. The company’s vice president for legal, Mike Woodfine, has spent the last year and a half leading on a digital strategy to transform the legal department to be more agile and innovative’.

The result has been a partnership to deliver legal services between the in-house legal team at DXC and alternative provider UnitedLex. Woodfine’s 90-strong team in the UK now works within UnitedLex, providing legal and commercial services as one DXC legal team.

Legal consultant Leigh Dance comments: ‘Woodfine’s legal team is going through the most disruptive digital change I’ve seen and he’s right at the forefront of it and the leader of a whole new strategy for getting to market faster.’

Woodfine is in charge of managing a service, now, as much as managing a team. His legal advisory panel has had to adjust to its partnership with an alternative legal provider and get used to working more virtually. ‘The
work that is going to UnitedLex relates to transaction and contractual commercial services, and we’ve created an innovative, high-performing strategic partner law firm panel for additional, discrete legal advice.’

With just ten members of staff retained in-house, some of the DXC legal team have also been offshored to UnitedLex delivery centres in Sofia, Manchester and Bangalore. ‘We’ve stratified and transformed our legal department by moving work to the most appropriate resource according to complexity and value. Overall, we have reduced our cost by about 30% and moved from fixed to variable costs, giving us more flexibility on budgeting.

The next stage is to move to digital contracting, while Woodfine says partnering with UnitedLex has given the legal team valuable access to technology it might otherwise have struggled to secure budget for, such as AI, analytics and contract management systems.

‘We’re seeing the commoditisation of contract law in areas of technology services. We’ve adapted our contract methodology to achieve a balanced position, which allows us to move to digital contracting and accelerate the company’s speed to revenue.’