By 2024, the company’s in-house legal team was dealing with two pressures at once:

1. High volumes of procurement contracts across indirect categories, while 
2. A complex corporate restructuring and wider business transformation increased urgency, stakeholder scrutiny, and the cost of delays.

The indirect procurement legal workflow, in particular, was being slowed by operational friction:

• Fragmented templates and inconsistent starting points across contract types 
• Limited legal capacity to keep pace with intake and negotiation demand 
• Inefficient escalation routes, creating bottlenecks when issues needed senior input or faster decisions

This resulted in contracting delay risk during a period where the business needed procurement to move quickly and predictably - and where legal needed to stay close enough to protect the business without becoming the constraint.

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In transformation periods, procurement contracts become more time-sensitive and delays can ripple into:

• Slower project delivery (technology, logistics, CapEx initiatives) 
• Increased stakeholder frustration and workarounds 
• Higher risk if teams bypass standards to keep momentum 
• A legal team forced into reactive triage rather than proactive control

The client needed additional capacity and an extension of the legal team that could absorb volume, integrate with procurement stakeholders, and improve how contracting work moved through the system.

If you’re running procurement contracting through a transformation, this case study demonstrates a practical pattern for success:

• Start with managed service to stabilise BAU and improve turnaround 
• Add embedded senior resource to strengthen integration and unblock escalations 
• Expand into adjacent areas (e.g., direct procurement) once the model is proven 
• Use early wins (templates/playbooks) to set up longer-term standardisation

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We provided managed legal services as an extension of the in-house team -starting with indirect procurement, then expanding as the transformation progressed.

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Phase 1 (2024): Managed service for indirect procurement contracting

Radiant took on day-to-day contracting work including intake, review, and negotiation across key indirect categories:

• IT 
• Marketing 
• Logistics 
• CapEx

The initial managed service model was designed to reduce pressure on internal teams and improve responsiveness - while also creating space to tackle process issues that were slowing work down.

Early operational improvements included:

• Template consolidation to reduce variation and rework ‍
• Playbook consolidation to support more consistent negotiation positions and faster decisioning

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Phase 2 (2025): Evolving to embedded senior resource

Following early success, Radiant’s support expanded in 2025 to include flexible senior legal resources embedded within the client team to improve:

• Integration with procurement stakeholders 
• On-the-ground alignment with how decisions were being made 
• Identification of further optimisation opportunities

This embedded model helped ensure work didn’t “bounce” between service and in-house - reducing friction and improving day-to-day collaboration.

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Phase 3: Expansion into direct procurement

As transformation increased both volume and complexity, Radiant expanded support to Reckitt’s direct procurement legal team, placing one senior lawyer, and one junior lawyer within the team.

This team supported contracting across raw materials and strategic sourcing, where deal complexity and business criticality tend to be higher, and where delays can quickly become material.

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Radiant now delivers a fully integrated procurement legal solution across both direct and indirect procurement, combining:

• A scalable managed legal service supported by a team of lawyers, and 
• Three secondees specifically embedded within the organisation’s legal team

A legal team member said: “We have deployed Radiant for both BAU and temporary secondments. We also get support for exceptional, strategic and high-profile transactions like M&A, where I can particularly say you have overdelivered.”

This evolving delivery model helped the client reduce contracting friction on two fronts:

• Capacity relief: absorbing BAU work and supporting peaks in demand 
• Crocess maturity: consolidating templates and playbooks and improving the “routes” work takes through the team

Critically, the service was integrated into the wider project ecosystem, rather than operating as a disconnected external resource.

Another stakeholder commented - “Based on what I see, the Radiant team’s support is excellent. With exceptional projects I’m now on internal calls and people regularly refer to Radiant, rather than Legal, and I have to say it makes me both proud and a little bit jealous! You have integrated your service and delivery into our wider project team which is a real mark of your success.”

Across both direct and indirect procurement, Radiant’s integrated model has:

• Reduced contracting delays 
• Eased pressure on in-house resources, freeing the internal team to focus on priority work 
• Improved collaboration between legal and procurement stakeholders 
• Laid foundations for more standardised, efficient contracting processes 
• Supported multi-jurisdictional and global contracting requirements