Over the years, Aon had developed a Lotus Notes-based application to manage its legal operations, but with offices in 17 countries, the insurer struggled to overcome the limitations brought about by different offices in different countries dealing with their own formats, processes, and procedures.
"One office might provide information in Excel spreadsheet, another might use Word," says David Cambria, director of operations for the law department at Aon. "They might be tracking different variables or different data points, so we weren't getting consistently reported information."
Cambria adds the company also had to deal with legal issues, such as maintaining the privacy and confidentiality standards of its settlement agreements.
"We needed a way to make that consistent across the company," he says.
Aon had parallel and disparate systems, which Cambria explains meant as his department became a more unified global legal department it became harder to manage the operation across a single platform.
"We were looking to increase efficiencies and cost effectiveness while ensuring the information gathered and stored was controlled and shared uniformly and had consistent processes around it," he says.
Aon built out a confidential litigation settlement process, according to Cambria, along with a comprehensive reserving process.
"We used it as a tool to manage the day-to-day allegations, arguments for and against, findings and determinations, statutory references, and regulatory issues," he says. To do that, Aon turned to the TeamConnect product from Mitratech back in 2006.
"The best part is we have all this rich data and we can actually analyze and study it to make predictive analysis on how to approach things in the future," says Cambria.
Because of the complexity of the Aon legal operations, Cambria felt Aon could not turn to any out-of-the-box type implementation.
He felt the robustness of the TeamConnect toolkit would allow Aon to create and orchestrate a system that worked across borders, languages, and currency to meet the process needs Aon was establishing.
"The reason we were looking at a system was because we had a homegrown application, but we were finding there were shortcomings in trying to do it ourselves," he says. "We were looking for a way to unify all the required and necessary pieces of a law department to better manage and control what was happening day to day."
Recently, Mitratech added a new piece to TeamConnect called LegalHold.
"It's almost the same story," says Cambria. "The tool we were using to manage litigation holds also was a homegrown tool and was used to manage and audit the whole process–the workflow and recording of documents, both electronic and paper, throughout the organization. We had a duplication of effort around the information in TeamConnect, so we wanted to unify that information on one platform so we could expand on the capabilities of TeamConnect."
Cambria explains the new piece didn't bring about any major changes for the Aon users.
"The interface and compatibility with our design was closely integrated," he says. "We looked at the litigation process and made sure it aligned with the TeamConnect litigation hold process. We made a few tweaks and changes–there is always going to be some level of that–but we found it was a pretty straightforward adaptation here in the law department."
Flexibility is a key issue in the process of managing litigation holds, explains Cambria. "It's straightforward, but it is not always simple," he says. "The process involves multiple regulatory requirements around confidentiality and data privacy. It involves cross-border issues around data transfer. Having that level of flexibility was a key to what we were looking at."
Lawyers are known to be vocal about their likes and dislikes, and Cambria explains he has not heard any complaints about the TeamConnect and LegalHold systems.
"To me that's a good sign," he says. "It's a system they are already familiar with, it integrates well with their day-to-day process, and it integrates well with our ability to communicate with people outside our system through a litigation hold portal. It's all been well received."
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