PERSUIT and Sanofi, as pioneers of legal procurement, received the 2022 Legal Procurement Teamwork Award from Buying Legal® Council. The award works to identify best in-class leaders of legal procurement and acknowledge their innovation.
“Sanofi and I were honored to be the recipient of the 2022 Legal Procurement Teamwork Award and delighted to share this recognition with our business partner PERSUIT. We look forward to continued partnership and excellence with the Buying Legal Council and PERSUIT!'' Jack Thompson, Assistant Director of the Legal Chief Operations Office, stated.
To increase Sanofi’s ability to control and predict spending on outside counsel, the company wanted to simplify and centralize its process for outside counsel engagement. Instead of relying on individual in-house counsel’s relationships to choose outside counsel, every legal matter should be managed using a transparent process that leverages the strengths of Sanofi’s procurement, legal operations, and in-house counsel. A team of Sanofi’s procurement and legal divisions gathered buy-in from senior leaders in legal, legal operations, finance, and procurement. The procurement team then collected information about the legal team’s existing partnerships, creating a list of preferred suppliers that were key partners for Sanofi’s legal team. Together, legal operations and procurement then designed and launched training for a new, centralized buying process where each legal matter would be managed through the PERSUIT software platform.
As a result of this teamwork, this new process is now used for all of Sanofi’s legal matters. In addition to helping Sanofi lower its legal spend and streamlining its operations, this project was the first major collaboration between two functions that until recently did not work as a team.
Dr. Silvia Hodges Silverstein, founder and CEO of the Buying Legal® Council stated, “These leaders in Legal Procurement are at the forefront of new developments. They are setting the stage for sweeping transformation of how legal services and legal technology are bought and used. Their advances inspire all of us and we all do well learning from them.”