Sonnedix: Preparing for rapid business growth

How do you prepare your Legal team for rapid business growth?

This was the challenge faced by Marissa Corda, Global Head of Legal and Compliance at Sonnedix.

Sonnedix is an International global solar company with a strong track record for designing, financing, building and monitoring high-performance, cost-competitive solar plants in four continents.

As the business pursued ambitious growth targets, the Legal and Compliance team faced the pressure of a mounting workload whilst trying to support the business with the same effective and high-quality service.

Marissa knew it was time to start doing things differently: “Our goal has always been to work smarter, not harder, and that’s where we were looking at process improvements and efficiencies throughout the department.”

Start small

For the answer, Marissa looked to the world’s first Legal Operating System, Plexus. The solution stood out for its modular app system, which allows lower-value and routine tasks to be automated, and free up the Legal team for the high-reward, high-risk tasks.

This wasn’t just a new software solution; this was a whole new way of working. So, it’s little wonder that Marissa had some fears going into the project.

“My personal concern with implementing legal technology was that I’m not an IT professional,” admits Marissa. “What would that mean for developing and rolling out an IT solution for the wider business? And how would we translate the work we had in high volume in a way that makes sense and is easy in a self-contained app?”

Enter the Plexus team. With experience helping more than 100 in-house legal teams successfully realise the power of technology, they worked closely with Marissa and her team to define their challenges and figure out exactly what they needed in order to improve productivity and free up capacity.

They began by automating the most basic documents: non-disclosure agreements. As well as being relatively simple and short, these standard forms represented a high volume of work coming through the departments and taking up time for the paralegals.

The app is designed to get this lower risk legal task done quickly, consistently and securely. Marissa says the time savings are significant: “What used to take us multiple days now takes just 12 minutes to execute and draft an NDA.”

Reimagine transparency

Not only has the Plexus solution unlocked productivity gains, it has provided the wider business with a centralised portal to interact with the Legal team. For a company that operates in four continents and across 13 different time zones, this is a huge advantage.

“We’ve achieved a transparency that didn’t exist before. Before Plexus, the business was emailing my team to find out the status of legal work. Now they can see an icon which tells them if the task has been completed or is in progress,” says Marissa.

“Plexus is making a really big difference for our team. I think it would be helpful for any corporate legal department looking at scaling up effectively and quickly.