Case Study
Reshaping a Multinational Publishing and Education Company’s Law Department
November 15, 2022
The Situation
Pearson’s Legal Department was facing an unprecedented operational challenge.
In 2017, the business committed to becoming a simpler, more efficient company, including the reduction of annual costs by £300 million by the end of 2019.
To meet this challenge, Pearson’s Legal Department developed initiatives for how to transform their operating model. One of the most important was to create a single service delivery function to ensure the right resources deliver the right work at the right cost structure.
This initiative focused on creating a service delivery center within the department that would provide legal services to the business for both revenue and expenditure matters across the company’s businesses operating worldwide. The department believed that creating the service delivery center would yield significant operational benefits because it would move them from a historically decentralized, high-touch concierge model to one that was more centralized, using standardized processes, and utilizing technology much more effectively for insights and automation.
The Vision
Pearson’s vision for the center included standard processes, playbooks, templates, and workflows driven by a single technology platform to service intake, cradle-to-grave contract processing, self-service applications, and analytics enabling the center to be run based upon data-driven insights. Creating the center would allow them to both transform service delivery and to yield material financial savings – all in support of Pearson’s overall strategic objective of becoming a simpler, more efficient company.
Partnering with Morae
Pearson’s legal team now had to bring the center to life and fully operational by the end of 2019. In order to do this, Pearson needed to establish and implement a world class operating model. Based on the current state analysis and scope of work, informal market research, and financial modeling, Pearson identified three models for how to build and operate the center.
Insourced Model:A fully captive center staffed and operated solely by Pearson personnel.
Outsourced Model: An outsourced model staffed and operated by an external partner, with a very light engagement layer from Pearson.
Hybrid Model: A hybrid model staffed and operated by a small team of Pearson personnel and a larger team from a Pearson partner.
Bringing it to Life
Pearson decided on the hybrid model and selected Morae as their partner to implement and operate the Service Delivery Center, including implementation of a Legal Service Request (LSR), Contract Management (CM) and workflow automation platform to underpin and drive the center. Morae partnered with Onit for the technology and they collaboratively tailored it to fulfill Pearson’s vision.
Pearson’s choice to work with Morae was based on the following criteria:
The Implementation
With the selection of the operating model, technology and partner, Pearson embarked on implementing both the Service Delivery Center and the technology platform.
Morae was right there with the Pearson team every step of the way, providing services ranging from consulting during the initial current state analysis on through the implementation and design phases for both the Service Delivery Center and technology platform.
“We view Morae as an extension of Pearson’s broader legal team. In this capacity, they directly interact with our customers, our internal clients, and our external vendors. Morae has been a fantastic partner.”
SVP, Associate General Counsel at Pearson
For the Service Delivery Center, Morae provided the implementation methodology, buildout timeline and dedicated attorney and non-attorney professionals. Additionally, Morae developed playbooks, templates, workflows and standardized processes from intake to archiving of transactions and further assisted with development of training materials and change management processes.
To efficiently manage user demand for support, Morae instituted a Legal Front Door intake desk, with Onit-powered automated workflows, to ensure service levels would be consistently met for all requests.
For the technology implementation, Morae provided a full range of services, including designing and implementing the platform in partnership with Onit. Morae also established knowledge management, training materials and workflow protocols for Pearson’s end users.
The implementation work was completed within nine months, during 2018. Morae has since collaboratively managed delivery of the services as a key part of Pearson’s legal team for the breadth of the company’s transactional matters.
Peer Recognition
The Service Delivery Center, along with the Onit-powered tools and workflow automation, has materially reduced Pearson’s legal department costs.
Building on this success, Pearson expanded the center to include all matter types across the globe to be supported by the Morae team in partnership with the Pearson team. The expansion effort included IP, employment, compliance, data privacy, litigation, research, operations and day to day business support.
The Results
Pearson has been honored to receive multiple awards in recognition of their achievements with this project. Morae applauds Pearson’s vision and dedication to transformational change.
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