Coca-Cola Europacific Partners needed to capture all their matters in one matter management system

Coca-Cola Europacific Partners needed a matter management solution that would deliver automated, real-time legal reporting and eliminate paper forms and manual entry.

Xakia brought ‘instant relief’ to the Australian in-house legal team at Coca-Cola Europacific Partners. Our legal matter management software was able to capture the team’s ‘full universe of matters’ for accurate and efficient reporting.

About Coca-Cola Europacific Partners

As one of the largest bottlers and distributors of beverages in the Asia Pacific, Coca-Cola Europacific Partners employs more than 14,000 people and serves more than 270 million consumers. Coca-Cola Europacific Partners distributes some of the world’s most loved beverage brands, including Coca-Cola, Diet Coke, Sprite, Powerade, Monster, Jim Beam, Canadian Club and Maker’s Mark.

In Australia, Coca-Cola Europacific Partners’ Legal team handles the legal needs for three business units with operations in Australia, Fiji and Samoa, as well as corporate functions such as Strategy, Insurance, Treasury and Risk.

Challenge

The Australian legal team’s major struggle was with reporting, according to its Deputy General Counsel in 2019. It relied on a manual process that required lawyers to fill out paper forms, which an administrative staff member later compiled into an Excel spreadsheet on a monthly basis.

Without a central repository for matters or a standardized way of classifying their importance, the Deputy General Counsel said, the team’s view of its own activity was likely incomplete, or worse, inaccurate.

The Legal Department needed a way to capture its “full universe of matters.” This would ensure accuracy in reporting to business units and company leadership and save time in manual reporting and follow-up discussions.

Approach

Coca-Cola Europacific Partners wanted a legal matter software that would deliver automated, real-time reporting – and eliminate paper forms and manual entry. When Xakia was integrated into the team’s existing legal operations workflow, there was instant relief.

“Everyone on the Australian Legal Team absolutely recognized that [manual reporting] was a ridiculous way to do things in this day and age. The team was happy to move to Xakia straight away, it was a no-brainer.”

Result

After implementing Xakia, the legal team’s reporting is more timely, accurate and actionable:

1. The Legal Department at Coca-Cola Europacific Partners has eliminated lag times in their reports

The legal reports are complete and reliable. This eliminates a considerable amount of stress, “Everyone understands what’s getting reported on is the full universe of issues, and ultimately that goes to your confidence as a general counsel giving information to a CEO. Now, when we provide reports to our Board or Managing Directors, I have a lot more confidence that it’s holistic and systematic than previously.”

The old manual method would sometimes be backlogged by up to two months.

Now, “You can look at Xakia for matters on any particular day, and you know it’s going to be accurate at that point in time.”

2. The team uses data to improve its legal operations

Before using Xakia's matter management software, they knew “intuitively” that trademarks consumed a lot of time, but it was hard to quantify: Simply looking at the trademark register, for example, would not show the numerous inquiries the in-house legal team handled for marks that ultimately weren’t registered. After reviewing legal matter data in Xakia, the need for more structured trademark management was identified. That work is now allocated to a part-time in-house specialist, which frees up the rest of the team to handle other projects.

3. Access to real-time data

"By having access to real-time data with Xakia's legal analytics software, the Legal Department can more effectively match its priorities to the strategic goals of the company. If the business is saying ‘we’re focused on A, and we’re not actually that focused on B,’ but [Legal] is doing a lot of work for B, we can say, if that’s the business priority, we’re going to deprioritize work for B.”

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