Global agribusiness Al Dahra saves over 14 hours a month automating NDAs with Josef

Operating with nearly 70 entities in 18 different jurisdictions with over 5000 employees, Al Dahra’s in-house legal function only consists of around 11 personnel – which, while indeed supported by external counsel, is a lean team which values efficiency in order to cover the entire range of the organization’s legal work needs.

As the business is growing, more business functions have understood the abilities of the legal team and how it can support their work. As a result, the volume of important legal work such as commercial contracts, employment and IP advice has increased. However in turn, repetitive work such as answering legal FAQs and producing legal documents were also piling up.

“As most legal functions understand, there is a lot of work that lands on your desk that is not the best  use of your time, nor does it add much value to undertake that work – but it is necessary work to keep the organization running”, quoted Dawn Sanderson, Group General Counsel.

The legal team were putting in endless hours to meet the demands of the business, which Dawn knew wasn’t sustainable as the business continued to scale up.

Looking to ease the workload of the legal team, Al Dahra turned to Josef to begin automating many of their legal processes, starting with soft launching a bot that generates NDA contracts.

Generating NDAs was very time consuming as the legal team had to read every word on the page before they could summarize it or amend terms. Josef’s simple no-code interface allowed Al Dahra to build a series of NDA bots to automate the generation of NDA’s to meet their internal clients’ needs.

Al Dahra launched their NDA bot, named Alfie, across their business to commence automating this time-consuming task. Leveraging  Josef’s multilingual capabilities, the team were able to meet the needs of their teams in Romania and Serbia, by also creating bots in Romanian and Serbian.

“Once we saw how simple it was, it became very exciting as it was helping us with the resourcing issue and with the relationship with the business in terms of user experience,” Dawn says.

Saying goodbye to back and forth emails

Al Dahra’s NDA bots have improved the user experience internally as the bot is designed to be self-service and anyone with the link could use it. The bot has also helped in the standardization of how they collect information for the NDAs to be generated, thus delivering better consistency and

“Lots of different people around the business have been using that link, and the feedback has been really positive,” says Dawn. “It’s easy-to-use, and it’s quick. They just love that they can proceed without the legal team and  generate the document quickly and move on. If there are slight tweaks needed, they can come back to us”.

Quick to implement

Prior to Josef, Al Dahra’s legal team was using an ECM system to manage their interaction with internal clients. The system was hard to use to design processes and could not be used off the shelf. Not only did this mean they were reliant on the IT team but were also limited by the capabilities of the tool.

By switching to Josef, Al Dahra managed to get their NDA bots up and running quickly thanks to Josef’s easy-to-use no-code interface.

Saving HOURS on soul-draining NDAs

Dawn’s team previously spent over an hour working on individual NDA reviews. Since implementing their NDA bot, Alfie, they have generated over 85 NDAs – that is over 85 hours saved in NDA contract work that Dawn’s team can put back into important legal matters as Al Dahra keeps growing as a business.

“Using technology the right way can help you by taking low level, repetitive work off your desk, leaving you with more resources and time to undertake more complex tasks and add more value to your business,” says Dawn.

More fulfillment and better staff retention

By implementing a bot to automate time consuming NDAs, Al Dahra also encourages better staff retention, especially for young new hires within the legal team.

“You don’t want them to be bored or demoralized, you want them to enjoy their job and for them to stay, as they are really competent young professionals. You want them to feel like their work is of value and that it is interesting, not boring repetitive tasks which can be a bit soul destroying,” quotes Dawn.

Al Dahra has recently soft launched a bot named Frequently Asked Questions with Alfie to handle incoming legal  FAQs internally. They are also looking to integrate Josef with Thomson Reuters’s High Q – an LMS software in the near future and to expand on their Josef bots to handle services agreements.