Legal was becoming overrun - and the business was waiting

A US-based provider of investment research and financial services was growing fast across multiple business lines and regions. So fast that commercial contracting couldn’t keep up.

For the business teams, requests went in and then deals stalled while internal legal worked through an ever-growing queue. One business stakeholder described the impact plainly:

“Before, our legal team was overrun, we would wait far too long as a business.”

The pressure was creating operational strain and as volumes increased and the contract mix diversified, the organization needed a way to move faster without increasing risk, burning out its legal team, or creating inconsistent approaches across divisions.

The organization first engaged Radiant Law for a major, time-bound re-papering project within its analytics division. It was intended as a discrete engagement: get through a heavy lift, then move on.

That’s not what happened. From 52 contracts in 2023 to nearly 600 in 2024, read on for how Radiant enabled the transformation.

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A one-off project revealed a bigger bottleneck

Re-papering work is often a stress test. It exposes what breaks when contracting volumes spike: intake challenges, template inconsistencies creep in, unclear playbooks, and slow turnaround driven by manual triage.

As Radiant began supporting the analytics project, the organization saw what it looked like when external support didn’t just “help with overflow,” but operated in a way that matched internal expectations - commercially fluent, fast, and easy to work with.

At the same time, internal legal needed room to focus on higher-value, strategic work and questioned:

• How do we reduce time-to-contract without compromising governance? 
• How do we create contracting consistency across regions and business lines? 
• How do we scale support without creating a new management burden?

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Expanding support beyond the original scope

After the initial engagement, the organization made a practical call: extend Radiant’s remit into day-to-day commercial contracts.

In 2023, Radiant began handling commercial contracting for the organization’s data division. The model proved it could work beyond a project surge, for business-as-usual contracting.

By 2024, the relationship expanded again: into Procurement, additional data business lines, and continued support for the analytics function delivering nearly 600 contracts across three major regions, achieving:

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1) Speed that reduced business drag

Commercial teams felt the difference directly. Fewer stalled deals. Less waiting. More momentum.

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2) Sector fluency: “They speak the same language”

Contracting in investment research and financial services comes with nuances - regulated environments, data-driven offerings, complex stakeholder expectations. Radiant’s ability to understand the context and internal pressures shortened onboarding time and built trust quickly.

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3) Ease of integration: No “extra layer” to manage

A common point of weakness with outside legal support is that it creates more work for internal teams: re-explaining context, policing quality, and redoing templates. Here, the opposite happened - Radiant operated as a managed service that could flex across business units and geographies. As one legal stakeholder put it:

“It’s a collaborative environment and it is very much an open conversation with Radiant… The whole team is on it, they are prompt and they go above and beyond.”

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Building a robust process for continued scale

Radiant helped design structure from the ground up improving throughput and making performance trackable and repeatable:

• A bespoke intake form to standardize requests and reduce back-and-forth 
• A contracting playbook to align expectations and decision-making ‍
• Contract templates to improve consistency and speed across teams

With continued expansion planned, the organization has a model for scaling legal support without trading-off speed, governance, or stakeholder experience.

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