Leading Danish law firm Bech-Bruun says that it has taken up the digital challenge with its introduction of a new subscription service that allows clients to draft their own legal documents using “BB SmartDraft”.
“Our ambition is, quite simply, to make everyday transactions more easy and effective for our clients,” says Christian Ejvin Andersen, CEO of Bech-Bruun. “BB SmartDraft features an interactive document guide that helps our clients draft new legal documents in an easy and effective manner. Bech-Bruun’s experts guarantee that the legal foundation of the document is of high quality and is always up-to-date. Our clients will experience increased efficiency and significant cost saving on the numerous occasions when they would often have to spend time and internal resources anyway on drafting these various documents.”
The new services began as an internal project two and a half years ago, when Bech-Bruun decided to digitise the portfolio of documents used every day by its various departments.
The Copenhagen-headquartered firm’s ambition was to simplify processes and ensure a high and uniform level of quality. This process of thought gave inspiration to the idea of making the system accessible to clients.
Said to be the first of its kind in Denmark, BB SmartDraft offers draft versions of legal basic documents covering employment law, corporate law, M&A and compliance. Other significant areas of law will also be incorporated into the system over the next months. The billing model is a fixed subscription fee that covers the most common types of documents requested by the majority of enterprises and organisations. No extra fees will be added unless a client requests additional advisory services not included in the digital service, specialist packages or other bespoke adjustments to match specific requirements.
“This digitalisation allows us to do things in new and smarter ways all the time, and this includes the area of law,” says Andersen. “Naturally, as a business offering legal services, we need to size up this situation. Our foundation is obviously to render high-quality specialised advice, but what is new in our strategy is that we use our expertise and specialist knowledge to develop state-of-the-art digital standard solutions so that our clients may benefit optimally from the new digital options available in their daily work.”
BB SmartDraft is developed in collaboration with Danish company Green Meadow, which has developed Document Drafter, an automated template system for documents.
Time reductions of 60%
The new service is targeted at medium-sized and large enterprises and organisations requiring legal documents to be drafted on an ongoing basis. BB SmartDraft is structured as a subscription service in which clients may choose from a selection of subscriptions according to their individual needs. An interactive document guide makes the system user-friendly and flexible for the drafting of documents adapted to the users’ own requirements.
According to Andersen, it is a great time saver. “Apart from the guarantee that the legal aspects of a document are always brought up to date and are of the highest quality, BB SmartDraft also causes immense reductions in time. Our own HR department uses BB SmartDraft when preparing employment contracts for Bech-Bruun. Not only have we already detected a reduction of as much as 60% in the time spent on administrative work, we have also detected an improvement in the quality of our work,” he said.
Developed with the assistance of clients
Before being launched on the market, BB SmartDraft has been tested by clients and Bech-Bruun itself. The tests have generated substantial, useful feedback and contributed to the ongoing development of the service.
The service also enables Bech-Bruun to prepare customised documents for its clients, such as adapting the documents to a client’s own business letter format and business paper.
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