The Waterfront Partnership

Case Studies

Outsourcing and Procurement Case Studies 

Our client = the outsourcing customer

Our client is a large insurance company. It had decided to outsource the development, implementation, support & maintenance of its global claims management system. Since this meant outsourcing a business critical system, it was vital that the contract contained sufficient "carrots and sticks" to ensure that the development and implementation was completed in accordance with the project plan. Failure to do so would cause our client severe operational issues since the licences to the legacy claims management system were terminating on a specific date.

We drafted the contract whilst providing pragmatic advice on the "usual" provisions for ensuring that suppliers complied with their obligations. We also reviewed all the accompanying contractual documents including the responses to tender, the project plan, milestones etc. By doing this we were able to ensure that all the documents were "legalised" so that the supplier was obliged to comply with the "promises" made by them in their initial documents. For example, there is no point a supplier stating that they will ensure that claims are managed 30% quicker if this is not a legally binding commitment.

Because we very often work for suppliers, we are well aware of the "clever" drafting used by suppliers to enable them to avoid responsibility when projects start to fail. Bringing our expertise to bear we were able to ensure that our clients were protected.

In this instance, the project did start to fail, the supplier pulled key staff off the project in order to work on a bigger contract elsewhere. Our client engaged with the supplier management team and was able to use the obligations in the contract, including service credits and the threat of other contractual remedies, to ensure that the supplier re-allocated the resources which were needed to ensure that our client got its claim management system delivered on time.

Our client = a supplier of outsourced services

Our client is a large UK based Business Process Outsourced Service Provider.

It is expanding fast and is providing services to a growing number of global financial institutions. Navigating through the financial sector's procurement teams is a skill in itself and it is one which we have a lot of experience of.

Recently, our client was presented with a contract by an investment bank which was stated to be "standard" and our client was told "sign this as is or else we walk away from the deal".

Whilst it is prepared to take on a certain amount of risk in doing business, our client, as with any other sensibly managed organisation, needs to understand the risk it is assuming and not accept provisions which are commercially unacceptable.

We assisted by articulating, in commercial terms, what risks the contractual provisions represented to our client. We worked together with our client's account manager and finance director to agree what risks our client was prepared to accept, what risks could be mitigated and which ones it couldn?t accept.

We attended the meetings with the investment bank and assumed responsibility for translating the legal provisions into actual examples of why certain provisions should be re-visited by the parties and not just signed "as is".

The investment bank agreed to revisit its standard contract and amended certain of the provisions that represented the greatest risk to our client. The parties have now signed a contract which is more commercially robust for our client and contains obligations that our client knows it can deliver to.

Our client = the public sector procurer

Our client is a government agency.

We assisted the in-house legal team with the procurement of a business critical software system and subsequent support and maintenance.

We put together the necessary objective criteria on which the BAFO submissions relating to contracts would be assessed.

We assumed responsibility for chairing the meetings with the bidders pre-BAFO and ensured that the appropriate public sector procurement regulations were adhered to.

As well as the above, we assessed the BAFO submissions for compliance with the contractual requirements and assisted with all face-to-face meetings between the legal and commercial teams.

Although our client was the legal department itself, by bringing us in to assist, they could be confident that the EU procurement regulations were being complied with, and could draw on our procurement experience to supplement their own in-house expertise.

Our client = the public sector supplier

Our client is an AIM listed software supplier. It supplies software to a number of sectors and one of its key channels are NHS Trusts.

NHS Trusts are deemed to be public sector bodies and therefore "contracting authorities" for the purpose of procuring goods and services.

Although our client is familiar with the various standard contracts utilised by NHS Trusts, it calls us in at the tender stage to ensure that its commercial obligations are accurately reflected in the contractual documentation.

Over time, we have managed to build a relationship with the lawyers who most frequently represent the particular NHS Trusts that our client provides its software too. By doing this, we are able to facilitate constructive dialogues between our client and the particular NHS Trust to whom it is supplying software.

By being familiar with our client, it's products and services, it's customers and the procurement process specific to them, we can ensure that the time we have to spend assisting our client is kept to a minimum - focusing our efforts where we know we need to and bringing our previous experience to bear to make sure that the procurement process is navigated with the minimum amount of elapsed time, internal management effort and legal fees!