Putting data-derived insights to work

Culture and strong firmwide networks only get you so far. To give a full service client the benefit of an entire firm’s expertise you need sophisticated but easy to use data.

That’s what we brought to our principal legal advisor role with Heineken UK, and that’s how we were able to deliver not just an insightful view of our work with the company, but new insights across Heineken UK’s business.

The challenge

We are Heineken UK’s principal legal advisors, which is a big responsibility and a rare challenge. How do we make sure Heineken UK is getting the benefit of the full range of our expertise, from traditional legal services to tech-enabled managed legal services? How do we make sure we meet all of the company’s needs?

More than that: how can we leverage the unique insight we gain by being the principal legal supplier to help Heineken UK to understand itself better, and to anticipate opportunities and risks and deal with them earlier than ever?

The solution

Of course our existing processes, tech capabilities, internal networks and working practices support this. But we wanted to do more, so we built technology which extracted data from lots of our systems to deliver a series of concise, easy to use, commercially-focused tech-enabled dashboards for Heineken UK’s legal and operations teams.

This approach also gives Heineken UK’s Director of Legal Affairs a single view of the status of all the many workstreams involved, highlighting progress against anticipated volumes and KPIs, allowing a one-glance assessment of the position across the relationship as a whole on a real time basis.

This way of managing and visualising data on this scale was new to us, and new to Heineken UK.

The result

The dashboards have given Heineken UK an at-a-glance view of resourcing, spend and progress against targets across five streams of work, allowing for accurate budget and resource management.

But they have done much more than that. The dashboards have given Heineken UK insights into its business that it simply couldn’t have got any other way.

A sudden spike in one kind of legal activity prompted a review and assessment of the circumstances to understand if there was a potential risk. But on investigation it was just an increase in Heineken UK’s own activity in relation to a reporting deadline. Together we had identified a potential problem and quickly understood it was an admin concern not a serious underlying issue.

In its property portfolio Heineken UK could quickly see in real time the status of each matter: which lease negotiations were stalled and whether the matters were with it or with tenants. This allowed it to understand across its whole estate what the blockers to quicker resolution were so that processes could be refined to deliver efficiencies and accelerate transactions.

This has allowed Heineken UK and Pinsent Masons to work together to identify trends and issues earlier than before, and to identify ones that would never have been visible in the past. It has allowed Heineken UK to allocate its legal resources to the right issue at the right time in a way that would simply not have been possible before.