At a Glance
Client Industry: Biotech & Healthcare (Fujirebio Europe)
Core Challenge: Back-end legal drafting tasks, manual template management, and front-end business support across European operations.
InvestCEE Solution: Enterprise document automation and centralized internal contract portal powered by our LegalTech Toolkit.
Key Outcome: Instant contract generation, 100% standardized compliance, and automated self-service drafting for business teams.
Project Background
InvestCEE LegalTech Consultancy assisted Fujirebio’s European operations in implementing document automation technology in their legal department. The legaltech advisory team worked closely with Fujirebio Europe’s in-house counsel based in Ghent, Belgium to source and implement the adequate platform corresponding to their specific legal workstream needs.
A proven pioneer and partner to the healthcare industry, the Fujirebio Group has global teams located in Japan, Asia, Europe and the US. In Europe, beyond general corporate, IP and other legal matters, Fujirebio Europe’s in-house team handles numerous commercial contracts and strategic partnerships.
The European in-house legal department needed:
- a dedicated software solution that would serve as their back-end tool for generating commercial documents used by the business on the front-end;
- besides managing standardized document templates, the legal team aimed to set up an interactive clause library; and
- save their lawyer’s administrative time and hassle, while improving service and turnaround time for the company’s business clients.
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The Challenge: Contract Drafting Across European Operations
Fujirebio Europe, a leader in biotech and diagnostic solutions, required a streamlined approach to manage its recurring legal documentation and commercial agreements across European subsidiaries.
Fujirebio Europe has a small legal team — their two counsels and contract coordinator have already carefully designed internal workflows in order to maximize efficiencies in their department. However, centralized tools used by the organization (electronic folders and physical databases) provided limited support to specifically legal workstreams. To make the most of the traditional IT infrastructure, the in-house legal team had also set up standardized document templates, created procedures for document processing and directed business clients to a “legal portal” on the intranet.
Despite best efforts, this preliminary approach left some of the legal team’s daily challenges unsolved:
- Electronic and physical databases remained passive storage units that would not easily allow for collaborative working or interactive template management;
- Traditional document management didn’t allow to embed clear and easily accessible guidelines for the business users with respect to standard clauses and alternative positions
- Agreement templates often led to requests with incomplete information or questions or didn’t actually warrant legal department involvement; and
- Overall, general support and standard document management amounted to approximately 25% of the legal team’s workload on a daily/weekly basis.
The InvestCEE Solution: Template Automation & Centralized Document Portal
By the time Fujirebio Europe’s legal department reached out to InvestCEE’s advisors for legaltech support, the in-house team had a digitization strategy already planned. Accordingly, InvestCEE’s role in this case was more about ensuring alignment of scope and functionality offered by our LegalTech Toolkit vendor partners and enabling pilot projects with test environments for users.
Given that Fujirebio Europe’s legal leaders have already started rethinking internal processes prior to deploying smart technology, the collaboration was aimed at sourcing the adequate legaltech solutions that truly fit their working style.
InvestCEE partnered with Fujirebio Europe to digitize, standardize, and automate their core legal template ecosystem in three steps:
Step 1: Standardizing Core Legal Templates
Including commercial contracts, and corporate forms—converting static documents into dynamic, cloud-ready templates.
Step 2: Clause Library & Questionnaire Logic
Users simply answer a series of guided, step-by-step questions prepared by the legal team from the back-end.
Step 3: Centralized Internal Document Portal
We established a secure, centralized internal portal serving as a single point of entry to contract templates via FujiRebio Europe’s intranet. Business stakeholders can now self-serve routine documents independently, while complex agreements are routed to legal counsel for strategic input.
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Key Impact Metrics & Outcomes
Automated Self-Service Drafting for Business & Legal Teams
Compliance on Standardized Corporate Templates
Centralized Internal Portal for All Document Generation
The Results: Streamlined Workflows & Accelerated Business Execution
Streamlining everyday work processes first and then proceeding to a step-by-step implementation paved the way to the coordination of back-end and front-end document drafting tasks at Fujirebio Europe. The in-house team shared the following results about the transition:
- The legal department is enabled to keep the contract templates up-to-date and compliant at all times for the business units.
- Business department requests for standardized legal documents were redirected to automated smart templates via the “legal portal” — the widget functionality proved particularly helpful in this respect. Widgets are “document buttons” (made available on the intranet) leading to automated templates that allow business users to self-serve and generate documents by answering a carefully crafted legal questionnaire prepared by lawyers. Accordingly, end-users of widgets (i.e., business stakeholders) need no access to the back-end drafting platform and yet can access automated documents directly from the cloud.
- The review of draft legal documents has become transparent and considerably easier to manage — business requests with incomplete information and questions that didn’t actually warrant legal department involvement were minimized.
- The legal department now has access to a complete and reliable archive of digitally generated legal documents, immediately available to all team members with access rights.
- Internal collaboration among legal team members and with operational units is expected to significantly improve. Inge Delputte, Legal Director at Fujirebio Europe said: “Business stakeholders will have a more clear understanding of the legal team’s strategic role in complex legal matters and how automation can play a role in routine, standard document management tasks. Ultimately, this adds to the legal department’s visibility and value-add across our organization”.
- As business needs evolve, the legal department can easily automate new document templates for new types of standard requests, ensuring the correct background information and instructions are captured directly by the document automation tool. Hence Fujirebio Europe can improve knowledge management without unnecessary burden on the legal department.
Key Operational Gains
Document automation serves as the foundation for back-end and front-end legal drafting at Fujirebio Europe. As soon as documents are finalized and management proceeds to signing, Word versions or PDFs are exported or forwarded for signing directly from the platform. Overall, template drafting, document generation and pre-signing contract related work streams have become more streamlined, accurate and actionable. Legal and business teams can now focus their time and expertise wisely when it comes to managing documents at Fujirebio Europe.
By transforming static templates into an automated document engine, Fujirebio Europe achieved immediate operational gains:
Instant Document Generation: Turnaround time for creating compliant, error-free contracts was reduced from hours to minutes.
Controlled Risk & Consistency: Built-in playbook logic ensures all generated agreements strictly adhere to approved corporate and regulatory standards.
Empowered Business Stakeholders: Non-legal teams can independently draft standard documents, freeing in-house legal counsel to focus on high-value strategic matters.
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