A legal team getting squeezed from both ends

In 2021, the bank’s Digital Business Services legal team was dealing with a familiar kind of growth: more contracts, more moving parts, more stakeholders, more regions and more pressure to move quickly without loosening controls.

Their mid-tier procurement contracting workload was rising. At the same time, expectations were changing:

• Faster turnaround to keep sourcing and delivery moving 
• Cost-efficiency without compromising risk posture 
• Consistency across regions so teams weren’t reinventing the wheel contract-by-contract 
• Commercial practicality so legal didn’t become a blocker‍
• Lean, optimised playbook and terms fit for purpose and usable

The existing approach using an outsourced provider was no longer matching what the team needed. The challenge wasn’t solely a capacity one, there was a gap between “processing work” and running contracting as an integrated, scalable service that could keep pace with the business and understand its functional elements for every day functionality.

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Volume, complexity, and the risk of becoming the bottleneck

For a global bank, the stakes are high: contracting touches regulatory obligations, security requirements, and commercial trade-offs that change depending on what’s being bought and where. The team needed a model that could handle high value, complex and BAU sourcing agreements for a wide variety of technology and service engagements, including:

• Global and local frameworks
• Standalone agreements
• Call-offs, Order Forms and Statements of Works
• Evaluation agreements
• Amendments, variations, renewals, adoption and participation agreements
• Risk Reviews
• Local country agreements

And they needed it to work globally - without creating a maze of exceptions, inconsistent positions, or handoff friction.

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Decision point: move away from the old model and build a managed service

In 2021, the bank made a decision to transition away from a previous outsourced provider and appoint Radiant Law to deliver a more scalable approach.

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Triage, standardisation, and continuous improvement (not just throughput)

Radiant’s role evolved into a global triage and delivery function for procurement legal requests - covering review, negotiation, and execution. The work focused on two key areas:

1. Work allocation that reduces friction
   Triage determines what gets handled quickly, what needs escalation, and where specialists should focus. It prevents the internal team from being pulled into everything, while avoiding risky “rubber stamping.” For a fast, consistent and pragmatic approach our triage model routes repeatable BAU work to Radiant and keeps strategic/high-risk matters in-house.
2. ‍Standardisation that speeds decisions without lowering the bar
   ‍Radiant added practical improvements designed to reduce rework and shorten cycle time while improving clarity:

• Service-specific annexures standardised across contract types to reduce repetitive drafting and back-and-forth
• Playbook revisions to align fallback positions - aiming for secure, pragmatic deals that teams can actually use 
• Risk review templates to make trade-offs clearer for informed business decisions 
• Regulatory integration to keep templates aligned to updated compliance needs 
• Contract automation to reduce turnaround time and improve consistency 
• Stakeholder training (videos and infosheets) to improve adoption and reduce avoidable errors upstream
• Expansion of NPS requests to business stakeholders and suppliers to obtain more intricate feedback
• Additional playbooks for local territories, service specific terms and regulatory provisions
• Counterparty paper checklists and annexures 

This improved speed and reduced the hidden cost of contracting: ambiguity, inconsistent negotiation stances, and stakeholder confusion that creates churn across legal, procurement, and the business.

By 2024, the model had become a global managed service across 30 countries that’s described internally as a deeply embedded extension of the bank’s legal function.

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• 92% customer satisfaction rating (4.6/5) ‍
• Expanded scope, now supporting more strategic, higher-complexity matters

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The Legal team commented:

“Radiant’s lawyers are really commercial, super practical and pragmatic but also very well versed in what we need. They see both sides of the story, both legal and commercial, and our teams really value it.”

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And the business said:

“Radiant are very proactive and I love the collaboration. Everyone is very good at supporting us.”

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What changed in practice

• Contracting is treated as a repeatable service, not a series of one-off firefights 
• The bank can move faster while maintaining confidence in risk positions 
• Continuous improvement is built into the model (templates, playbooks, automation, training), rather than being “extra” work that never gets prioritised
• Patterns from hundreds of agreements are turned into learnings for the bank enabling them to evolve risk and strategic priorities more easily.
• As the service matured, our scope has been expanded to more complex deals.