How a leading online travel marketplace reduced key-person risk and sped-up contracting

Our client operates a marketplace model that’s deceptively complex to support legally. Like other platform businesses, it doesn’t “own” the experiences being sold. Instead, it sits in the middle of a three-way relationship: experience suppliers, our client, and distribution channels that bring demand.

This structure creates a steady stream of income-generating agreements, supplier terms, and operational contracts that need to move quickly - without exposing the platform and the client to unnecessary risk.

The operating reality of the legal team across the UK and US is thin and made the business vulnerable in two key ways:

• Slow turnaround times on agreements tied to revenue and procurement needs, frustrating internal stakeholders and delaying the conclusion of deals
• Operational resilience is very limited with high risk of single point failures due to key-person dependency, if the team was not available, the work often stalled.

When Radiant began support, it was quickly observed that the legal workflow would benefit from an enhanced structure and operating model.

• Knowledge management: templates, preferred positions, and risk appetite to be captured in a standard repeatable way.
• Standard process: legal requests arrived ad hoc, with insufficient detail to complete the work and  without a consistent intake process.
• Performance visibility: limited tracking capability provided low understanding of volumes, turnaround times or number of interactions it took to close a contract
• High friction in negotiations: lengthy negotiations ensued due to documents often being more cumbersome than required, which slowed response times and extended contracting timelines.

We designed our support in a phased approach: first alleviate the load and stabilise deliver , then build a managed legal services model that could sustainably create resilience, improve efficiency and balance workloads.

Phase 1: Secondment commencement and delivery stabilisation (September 2025)

Radiant seconded two lawyers to the team to relieve capacity of internal lawyers  and keep contracting moving.

• Additional day-to-day contracting resources provided some breathing room and  continuity of legal support.
• We began building foundational assets for standardisation and repeatability:
  
  • Practical playbooks for common agreement types 
  • Risk review templates to document risk appetite 
  • Optimised standard agreement templates to be clear, concise and reasonable to reduce unnecessary negotiation time
  • Establish a mechanism to track volumes, matter types and other useful metrics 

The aim of this phase was to establish structure, create visibility of workload realities, identify potential gaps for optimisation and reduce turnaround times 

Phase 2: Transition to Managed Legal Services (from April 2026)

Once standard assets had been introduced, metrics had been shared and delivery stabilised , we transitioned to a managed legal services (MLS) model - shifting from person-dependent delivery to a team-based operating system. Key elements included:

• A centralised intake process for various streams of work within the Group
• A service model built around team capacity with clear, measurable service expectations
• A measurable contracting function

Legal became trackable, repeatable, and resilient.

1) Faster, more predictable contracting

With centralised intake, optimised templates, and defined SLAs, stakeholders experienced clear service targets and demonstrable performance improvement:

• 100% compliance within a maximum of 2 days turnaround with the objective of achieving 0.5 day turnaround consistently
• Four touches to close on average

2) Continuous improvement became BAU

Alongside the intake and service model, we kept tightening the “how” of contracting: simplifying templates, implementing predictable processes, standardising assets, and capturing knowledge to streamline legal approach.

3) Reduced key-person risk

Legal delivery was no longer dependent on any one individual holding critical context. Knowledge capture, standardised processes, and a team-based service model improved resilience and continuity whilst increasing speed and efficiency across the business.