Wüstenrot & Württembergische Group Success Story

THE STARTING POINT
Group law at W&W

Until 2018, the W&W Group’s Legal department was not organized in a uniform manner, as the Group Legal department resulted from the merger of several organizational units. For example, there were hand files whose existence was documented with truncated data in an Access database. Or there were processes which were edited directly from the mailbox and saved on network drives.

Under the leadership of General Counsel Dr. Margret Obladen, the Group Legal department now consists of three organizational units, which, in addition to the W&W Group’s own matters, are also responsible for all legal issues relating to the majority of the companies in the W&W Group. For example, the Group Legal department has outsourcing or service agreements with more than 30 Group companies.

STRUCTURE AND ORIENTATION
The requirements for the software

W&W did not make it easy for the providers, because they gave all interested persons in the area of group law the opportunity to define their personal requirements. The resulting questionnaire therefore comprised several hundred questions.

A decisive factor in the decision in favor of LECARE was that the applications can be operated in the company’s own data center. This means that all data remains in-house and W&W itself is the master of IT security, which is subject to very high standards. Nevertheless, there are also legal activities outside the organizational unit in the W&W Group due to departmental or divisional specifics. Being able to deal with this situation was also a requirement for a central legal management software.

THE DIGITAL (VALUE) SYSTEM

LECARE as the solution for holistic digitization as the solution for successful digitization

Since 2018, the W&W Group has implemented LECARE as legal management software to organize and manage all activities of the group legal. Thanks to the central data storage, LECARE forms the basis for almost all necessary information and supports the W&W Group in its collaboration with people outside its own organizational unit.

After striving for the greatest possible acceptance of the new software during the early stages of the selection process, great importance was also attached to the involvement of the employees during the introduction. This was reflected in the project team’s organizational chart, as each of the three organizational units provided two lawyers who actively contributed to the basic design of the new software.

This was the birth of the LECARE core team, which incidentally still meets regularly for knowledge transfer in stand-up meetings today. Since the core team members also act as multipliers, all colleagues always have sufficient contacts.

DR. MARGRET OBLADEN
General Counsel / In-house Counsel
W&W Group law

“Everyone is in charge: motivation, commitment, consistency.”

A LEGAL DEPARTMENT Many possibilities

• One particularly helpful function in the daily work of the W&W Group is: automation. Since sustainable data quality in LECARE is important to the W&W Group, automated plausibility checks are carried out that generate an optimization order to the respective referee for certain data constellations. In addition, all recurring reports are generated completely automatically, such as provision reports or attorney confirmations for the auditors.

• Information security is a top priority at the W&W Group. There is an information security management system that is also part of operational risk management in the W&W Group. In addition, a dedicated cyber resilience center has been established. In addition, protection goals, including consideration of all regulatory requirements, are tracked in a continuous control cycle.

Harald Jacob
Legal Operations Manager
W&W Group law

“The combinations of the different LECARE tools combined with automations are my favorites.”

And new challenges

In recent years, more and more challenges have been added to legal departments. In addition to the fundamental transformation from an in-house lawyer as an internal service provider to a corporate lawyer, the W&W Group was also concerned with the digital transformation of the in-house law firm. Agile working makes the W&W Group a fast and powerful unit that has found a new home in its newly created W&W Campus with state-of-the-art workplace equipment and innovative media technology.

The move to the new working environment was preceded by complete digitization with the introduction of LECARE as the central document management system. Here, New Work is not just a buzzword, but the working world of the future is becoming visible in particular through flexible forms of work such as mobile working and desk sharing.

FINDINGS Successful digital transformation

Since the introduction of LECARE, the W&W Group’s productivity and working methods have changed fundamentally via standardization to greater efficiency. Today, it is also clear that the W&W Group caught a lucky break by going live with LECARE and digitizing its hand files before the COVID19 pandemic. A final piece of advice from the W&W Group when dealing with LECARE: “Take sufficient time to model the basic concept of LECARE before going live. The more constellations are taken into account in advance, the better things will run after implementation.”