A global asset management company's in-house legal team faced rising NDA demand across multiple business lines alongside strict internal KPIs on turnaround times. The team wanted to free up capacity to focus on higher-value, complex work - while still ensuring the business had the speed it needed to keep deals moving and the consistency and control needed to manage risk.

Over time, this sort of pressure compounds, small delays create a backlog and every unclear request adds rework. A “quick question” becomes another context switch. The team could keep pushing harder but it wasn’t sustainable.

A temporary set of extra hands may have alleviated short-term pain but would not provide a long-term way to absorb demand without sacrificing service quality, and without forcing the in-house team into perpetual triage mode.

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The challenge was the operational reality behind the volume of NDAs:

• Multiple business lines generating different kinds of requests 
• Global coverage across regions and time zones 
• Turnaround KPIs that left little room for bottlenecks ‍
• A workload that would keep growing, not plateau

And like most legal operations problems, the friction wasn’t evenly distributed. Some matters were straightforward, others became negotiation-heavy. Some submissions arrived with complete context. Others required legal to chase for basics before review could even start, and all of it competed for attention.

The legal team needed a model where the service could scale with demand - without adding strain, without losing consistency, and without leaving stakeholders feeling like legal was a blocker.

The decision point

In 2017, the client brought in Radiant Law to deliver a managed legal service for NDAs - covering the end-to-end journey from intake to review, negotiation, and closure.

This went beyond a simple “lift and shift” arrangement, the goal was to build an engine that could handle rising volume while staying aligned with their risk appetite and internal ways of working.

As the relationship proved itself, the scope expanded beyond NDAs. Radiant also began supporting their DORA remediation project, reviewing ICT supplier contracts for compliance.

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The improvements were the kinds of operational changes that compound over time:

1) Playbook management that kept risk consistent

As patterns emerged - common negotiation points, recurring stakeholder asks, shifting priorities - Radiant kept the playbook updated. The result: tighter alignment, fewer escalations, and more consistent handling of risk decisions.

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2) Streamlined intake to reduce avoidable rework

Cleaner submissions meant faster starts. By improving how requests came in (and what information was included), matters could be triaged and progressed with fewer back-and-forths.

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3) MI dashboard for reliable visibility

Rather than relying on anecdotes about what was “busy,” we used management information to surface demand trends and bottlenecks - supporting better planning and prioritisation.

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4) Email automation to protect capacity

Standard responses reduced repetitive admin and freed up time for higher-value work - especially helpful when volumes spike.

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5) Turnaround times that matched business pace

The practical outcome was speed the business could feel: first drafts and reviews delivered in under half a day.

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6) Growth without extra strain

Even as demand increased, the model absorbed it: service volumes grew 19% year-on-year from 2024 to 2025 without adding pressure onto the in-house legal team.

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All teams experienced a calmer operating rhythm where legal could protect responsiveness without sacrificing strategic bandwidth.

Radiant’s managed service ran behind the scenes with greater efficiency, transparency, and scalability. The in-house team regained room to focus on work that required their judgement and proximity to the business, rather than being consumed by operational throughput.

In the client’s words:

The legal team commented: “Efficiency and pace. Radiant excel at those. The support we receive is smooth and fast, and you are always on top of everything, shortening our time to execution.”

The business team said: “I think it has been very positive to bring Radiant in, because our legal team wouldn’t have the capacity to react as quickly as we need it. Having the complete focus on our work from Radiant is great… Radiant is at the top of my list of the good ones. I don’t want to change the system, it works! A big point for me is that we are listened to if there are issues, and something is done to improve things.”

For the client, the hero moment wasn’t a flashy “transformation.” It was something more valuable: a legal function that could keep up with the business – reliably, no matter how fast demand grew.