Fintech Liberis 10X’d contract turnaround with Josef

UK-based fintech Liberis are the proud “OGs of embedded finance”.

The fast-growing fintech has delivered $1 billion+ in funding to companies globally, reaches new markets year after year, and is already present across Europe and North America.

This extraordinary growth is no accident! And it is facilitated by Liberis’s agile and technologically sophisticated in-house legal team, who have recently invested in contract automation on Josef.

General Counsel Alexis Alexander—voted  General Counsel of the Year 2022 by The Lawyer —heads Liberis’s in-house team and is always up for a challenge.

“I love to advise the business directly, make a strategic impact, and get my hands dirty,” she says.

A symptom of continued growth, Alexis noticed her team was being distracted by the drafting and review of low-risk contracts. She wanted to do something about it.

Triaging contracts

Not all contracts are created equal! Their risk, value and sensitivity all determine whether a manual review is required by any in-house legal team.

For Alexis, the team’s review criteria for third-party supplier contracts was ambiguous. To maximise efficiency, they wanted things to be clearer for the benefit of everyone involved.

“We really battled with it”, Alexis says.

“I thought, ‘How can we deal with this? I don’t want to hire someone and I really don’t want to pay a law firm either.’ It’s not worth the money and I don’t believe it’s worth anyone’s time.”

“We needed to be careful, though, because if a contract is worth £5,000, it’s low value, but if it involves processing incredibly personal sensitive data, it’s low value but high risk. Therefore, it should come through Legal.”

Initially, the team built a 35-question Microsoft Forms checklist to help them triage contracts effectively, but the cracks soon started to show.

“We built this checklist and kept realising, ‘Oh, we need a question on this, ah, we another question on that.’ It turned out to be 35 questions long and we were like, ‘No one will want to complete this, nor will they understand it.’”

“It was a royal failure and I’m very happy to admit my failures, but it taught us a valuable lesson: the simpler the better.”

Generating contracts

Elsewhere, the team was keen to improve how they generate partner contracts.

“At Liberis, we deliver our product on a white-labelled basis by integrating seamlessly with partners through a single API. Previously, the turnaround time from writing the first draft to sending a contract to a partner could extend up to 5 days.”

“We were eager to explore how we could speed this up to make the overall process better for everyone.”

Triaging contracts

Equipped with their learnings so far, the team bid farewell to Forms and decided to hop on Josef.

Alexis and her team knew their pain points and knew that whatever they built needed to be simple, effective and save them a bunch of time, long-term.

Fast forward through the ideation and building phases and there it was: Liberis’ new third-party supplier contract triage tool.

Its name? Lucky the Legal Lobster, of course. The team took special care making sure Lucky’s branding was on point. 

“[The lobster logo] wears a little Liberis t-shirt. And it has really worked!”

“People across the business use Lucky and we’re finding that lots of low-level contracts that we’d previously think, ‘Oh, maybe we’ll just review it’, are now being sent straight for signing which is great!”

To the delight of the team, the 35-point checklist has been consigned to the history books. With conditional logic and a beautiful end-user interface, the tool is now a simple, six-question, Josef intake and triage tool that users love.

Generating contracts

Following the success of Lucky, Liberis built and launched its self-serve Partner Contract tool.

While Lucky spends its time triaging, Liberis’ self-serve Partner Contract tool enables users to do the nitty gritty and generate a contract from scratch.

“All users need to do is select a contract from a specific dropdown menu and start building it from there. It’s really working for us!”, Alexis says.

But what about the results? Has the work paid off?

Days of time saved

“Saving time has been the primary way” Josef has impacted the team’s day-to-day, Alexis notes.

“We’re a very stretched team, but these days we have far less to do by way of marking up contracts.”

Lucky has been triaging to no end and, on average, is saving the team 1 hour per contract review.

Faster turnaround

Liberis’s Partner Contract has decreased contract turnaround times from up to 5 days down to 0.5 days. This means that the business spends less time waiting for legal, and more time getting to work!

Less lower level work, more strategy

By adhering to Lucky’s logic, Liberis no longer have to ask the question, ‘Review or not review?’.

Along with their Partner Contract tool, Alexis notes, “we’re now able to work on much more strategically important things.”

This means less money spent on low-level work and more energy freed up for high-level tasks that better steer Liberis’ ongoing expansion.

Looking the part

Looks matter and service delivery can notably impact a team’s outside perception.

“We work in a fintech which is highly, highly tech-savvy”, says Alexis. Therefore, by using Josef, “it makes us look like we’re part of the business.”

Both functionally and culturally, automation has enhanced the in-house team’s standing, and now known for their deft use of tech, “we’re busy thinking of further use cases for the near future!”