L’Oréal transforms legal delivery with Plexus

As the world’s leading beauty company, L’Oréal Australia & New Zealand operates at a fast pace, managing 26 brands in Australia and 19 in New Zealand. For General Counsel Anna Lozynski, this meant grappling with overwhelming volumes of low-complexity legal work, leaving little time for strategic initiatives or business partnership.

“We really wanted to position ourselves as being able to run with the business capably,” Anna explains. “We wanted to support them in a legally robust and compliant way, while also giving them the flexibility in terms of how they access that support.”

A global directive to digitally transform the business presented Anna with the perfect opportunity to embrace legal technology and reposition the legal function as both innovative and strategic.

Before Plexus: legal overload, limited strategy

Even with best intentions, the pressure of day-to-day routine requests left little room for improvement or innovation. The legal team was “all consumed by high-volume low-complexity tasks, there’s no space to step back, strategise and improve how you service the business,” Anna recalls. Work was reactive, with stakeholders unsure how and when to engage Legal, consuming valuable time and hampering Legal’s ability to deliver value or drive transformation.

Anna was also conscious of the human barriers to change.

“Lawyers also have a tendency to feel defensive and fearful of embracing technology because it is new and unfamiliar. And there aren’t that many examples of it in the legal industry.”

After Plexus: automation, self-service & strategic freedom

Implementing Plexus transformed Legal’s role at L’Oréal ANZ. Anna’s team plugged digital workflows and contract lifecycle management into the business, making routine legal work self-serve while keeping the legal team involved wherever risk required.

“L’Oréal Australia and New Zealand has been able to put their best lawyer, on their best day, on every device in the company—handling the work that was once a burden,” Anna says.

Plexus’ data analytics drive continuous improvement. “With Plexus, the team can easily access data across key areas of the business; how many agreements have been generated, how many rounds of negotiation is required per agreement, what contracts are up for renewal, and what contracts have a ‘change of control clause’ in them,” Anna explains. Automation reduced the average time for agreement generation from four hours to just 18 minutes

The transformation was so powerful that Anna’s CEO encouraged more: “it’s fantastic—do more of it.” The Legal team in Australia and New Zealand expanded its use of Plexus beyond NDAs and confidentiality agreements, rolling out new apps for marketing compliance, influencer agreements, services agreements, contractor tools, IT checklists and salon agreements.

Key outcomes

• Efficiency Gains: Routine agreements now generated in 18 minutes (down from four hours).

• Continuous Improvement: Entire legal workflow data now available for performance measurement and strategic planning.

• Business Satisfaction: Increased access to legal services with full compliance, driving trust and positive feedback.

• Headcount Growth: Demonstrated value led to 50% increase in Legal team headcount.

• External Spend Reduced: More support delivered internally; less reliance on external counsel for routine work.

• Culture Shift: “Plexus has really instilled a spirit of continuous improvement and an ingrained thinking of how we can embrace innovation in how we deliver legal services,” Anna says.

Lasting impact

“Plexus has empowered Anna’s team to do more for less, lower external legal spend whilst increasing the business’ satisfaction with Legal.” The legal function is now viewed as a trusted adviser, creative and solutions-focused.  No longer beset by defensive attitudes to technology but celebrated for “thinking differently,” supporting stakeholders, and turning legal into a business enabler. “It’s an exciting way to work.”

“This fear around legal technology meaning you can’t have extra human lawyers is absolutely not true. It’s about how we build relationships as trusted advisers with the business and also an opportunity to showcase to the business that we are thinking differently and that we are there to support them.”

With Plexus, L’Oréal has set a new benchmark for digital legal transformation in the global beauty sector.