A legal workspace that scales with the business

4DMedical is leading the way in medical technology through its flagship software which provides four-dimensional imagery of lungs. With their TGA and FDA-approved product, the opportunity for more advanced diagnostics of lung disease is monumental. The company went to market before the Covid-19 pandemic, contributing to the momentum and pace at which they’re scaling.

The search for a better way to organize legal

Beth Plunkett came on board in 2021 as the company’s sole Legal Counsel. Before then, 4DMedical relied on external counsel for legal advice and a team effort to manage the contracts registry using a spreadsheet, email, and shared drives.

“The spreadsheet lacked the ability for robust search. There is no tagging system, so if someone wanted to know what all contracts of a particular type looked like, what the budget was for them, or what insurance obligations we had, that information just wasn’t there. We would have to open up every single contract individually,” says Plunkett.

“I realized pretty early on that we needed something that wasn’t so manual, especially with plans to scale the team as the company continues to grow,” says Plunkett.

These inefficiencies lead Plunkett to search for a technology to help solve these problems. After looking specifically for a contract lifecycle management (CLM) tool, Plunkett was referred to the LawVu legal workspace and hasn’t looked back.

“Many of the other solutions I looked into were either too complex, too expensive or the complete opposite — super cheap but essentially a glorified spreadsheet that lacked that level of depth required to really support a growing legal function,” says Plunkett.

When Plunkett came across LawVu she found it struck the right balance between cost and functionality. She was also pleasantly surprised by the end-to-end possibilities LawVu provides: not only would she have a solution for managing contracts, but the system would scale alongside the department and wider organization, providing matter management, intake & reporting, and intergrations.

Fast and reliable implementation

The beauty of LawVu’s implementation process is that it can support the individual needs of the customer’s specific workflow and timing requirements. “The LawVu team was flexible and supportive toward how I wanted to manage implementation, and their ongoing support has been incredibly fast and reliable.”

Plunkett’s approach was to rollout LawVu slowly, starting with the contract management and then ramping up with matter management and intake & reporting for the wider business. “I was still new to 4DMedical and getting to know the company processes when implementing LawVu, so I wanted to consider those alongside rolling out the technology.

“I wanted to set the system up correctly from the start and having LawVu, which is highly configurable and can scale with the team, allowed for this” explains Plunkett.

The LawVu team also advised Plunkett on how to set up and optimize the tool for the growing legal team. “They talked me through the different options of how you could set it up and the different access levels, which was important to me for future-planning as our team grows.”

Once comfortable with the setup, Plunkett rolled the system out to the wider business.

“The Finance team saw immediate value in LawVu: if they have an invoice and want to check if the contract is signed, they can all access that now without going through me as a gatekeeper.”

More recently, Plunkett has also started getting the company executives on board so they can easily access their contracts. “It’s super user-friendly for them because I can assign access to specific contracts and all they need to do is log in, and they’re right there.” The team can also set up dedicated contract filters so that each user can quickly see the contracts they want by type, region, department, and value.

A solution to support a growing legal team

As mentioned, Beth initially went to the market for a CLM, however, she immediately saw the value in a legal workspace approach that would manage everything from intake to insights.

“That’s the great thing about LawVu — our initial need was a contracts register, but having a legal workspace that scales with us has set us up for success long term,” says Plunkett.

Having matter management and contract management in the one system has proved especially valuable with the import of the team’s historic contracts into LawVu and using matters to group them. Not only are contracts now stored and easily searched for, they are organized into matters. “For a specific area of work we might have two different vendors working on the same project and so by setting it up as a matter it automatically groups the contracts into one place. It just makes so much sense — all the contracts are there in the one matter.”

The next project will be rolling out the workspace to the wider business through the LawVu Business Portal, starting with the ability for users to generate their own NDAs. “I have set up the NDA wizard and the team is really impressed. The scalability potential for the LawVu Business Portal is awesome and I can’t wait to set up more wizards and automation to support the business.”

Having this kind of accessibility for other functions within the business in turn supports the legal team when resource is tight or someone is out of the office. “When I’m not available, other team members are able to create NDAs on behalf of whoever needs one,” explains Plunkett.

“In the past, I’ve found that people don’t want to do their own NDAs because it can take at least two weeks to manage and approve the template manually between various team members. But with LawVu, ours literally take two minutes.”

LawVu increases legal’s value to the business

For a small busy team, the key dates and expiry reminders functionality have been a ‘game changer’. “I no longer need to worry about these or remember to put them into a calendar: LawVu automatically notifies me and then I am able to flick them onto the contract owner and ask them for instructions about that contract that’s expiring.”

This is really important for the large complex contracts that the team handles — grant agreements or licenses — that might have a lot of milestones within the contract. “The key date function has been so good for this. Previously we had a manual process of capturing deadlines on a calendar or managing them in a spreadsheet. Now this is all captured and notified in LawVu.”

“When I trained executive team members on setting update reminders, they were super impressed by the added value of legal to the organization through LawVu. I don’t think these dates were something that they considered were possible to pull so quickly.”

Another key improvement to the team’s way of working has been the ability to export information. “If leadership wants information about a particular group of contracts, it can be pulled in 30 seconds which is an amazing improvement.”

Plunkett’s commitment to setting up a full-service solution to support her department will pay dividends going forward. As they continue to scale and bring on new employees into the legal team, all information will be accessible in one single source of truth.