Company: Banijay Finland, Endemol Shine Finland, and Jarowskij Finland
Industry: Television Production
Location: Finland
Banijay Finland, Endemol Shine Finland, and Jarowskij Finland are part of the international content group Banijay Group, which brings together over 130 production companies across 21 countries. The Finnish production companies create a significant amount of Finland’s most popular content each year. These productions operate as individual projects that require agreements—such as employment or subcontracting contracts—to be drafted prior to and during project execution.
Highlights:
- A single source of truth for contract templates
- Automated templates that keep agreements up to date
- In-house legal teams can automate their own contracts
“We continue to refine and add new templates in M-Files Ment and value its ease of use, which allows us to maintain our templates without technical support,” – Liina Laiso, Chief Legal and HR Officer for Banijay’s Finnish subsidiaries.
Key Challenges Before Implementing M-Files
When concluding contracts with producers, the companies’ legal team discovered that multiple different versions of the same contract were always in circulation, causing confusion and slowing down the processing of essential agreement documentation.
“It was always a time-consuming task to determine which version was the latest one we should be using. Managing this information in a more efficient and user-friendly way was a key requirement,” said Liina Laiso, Chief Legal and HR Officer for Banijay’s Finnish subsidiaries. “Furthermore, when legislative changes affected our legal phrasing, we found it to be a laborious process to locate and update all the different variations of our contracts—and even then, we couldn’t be certain we had updated every instance,” Liina continued.
The legal department was burdened with the tedious task of searching for and identifying the latest version of each agreement. “Additionally, as lawyers, we tend to reuse legal wording that best fits a current project based on previously agreed contracts of a similar type. Searching for the necessary clauses across many different contracts was also a time-consuming task,” said Liina. “We needed a tool that would allow us to draft documents faster, easier, and with greater compliance.”
The M-Files Solution
The company thoroughly surveyed the market to find an intuitive document automation tool to help its legal department efficiently process contracts and maintain compliance. “Fairly quickly, M-Files Ment stood out as the best choice for us due to its ease of use and competitive pricing compared to other products on the market,” Liina recalls.
Liina noted how helpful the M-Files Ment experts were during the implementation process: “For deployment, we initially focused on the documents that would bring us the greatest immediate value—our employment agreements. With support from Ment experts, we automated these documents and created templates for them before granting access to our producers for testing M-Files Ment. The feedback was positive, and we soon launched these initial templates into active use. Overall, the implementation took about three months, which fit our internal capacity well.”
“It also gave us as lawyers time to explore M-Files Ment and ensure we were in the best position to automate and support our legal documents going forward,” Liina added.
Results
When asked to evaluate the impact of M-Files Ment on Banijay’s Finnish subsidiaries, Liina highlighted how much easier it became to find and use contract drafting templates. “We now have quick access to all our latest legal templates in M-Files Ment, saving us search time. More importantly, having all the latest, regularly updated legal templates in one place with easy access means we can execute contracts much faster. There is also peace of mind that all documents we create comply with current legislation,” said Liina.
The benefits of M-Files Ment extended beyond the production companies to their partners as well. “It has also been beneficial for the people we contract with. The contracting process has been simplified because producers understand which agreements fit their needs and can prepare better, as they understand the likely obligations and negotiation points,” said Liina.
“We continue to refine and add new templates in M-Files Ment and value its ease of use, which allows us to maintain our templates without technical support. We started by testing employment agreements, and now we have automated over 30 different agreements. Our legal team manages the automation and maintenance of its own agreements. It’s actually fun to build agreement templates—especially when you see the celebratory confetti pop up when publishing a new template,” Liina concluded.
“We now have easy access to all our latest legal templates in M-Files Ment, saving time spent searching for them. Even more importantly, having all the latest, regularly updated legal templates in one place with easy access means we can execute contracts much faster.” – Liina Laiso
“M-Files Ment allowed us to consolidate our contract versions so that we have a single automated template for each agreement that everyone can access. This resolved the issue of identifying which contract precedent is the latest version—with M-Files Ment, the automated template is always the latest version.” – Liina Laiso, Chief Legal and HR Officer for Banijay’s Finnish subsidiaries.
Why M-Files?
M-Files is a global leader in information management. The metadata-driven M-Files document management platform enables employees to instantly find the right information in any context, automate business processes, and ensure information governance. This gives businesses a competitive edge and substantial ROI by providing a superior customer experience and higher quality work with reduced risk.
For more information, visit https://litiko.com/
*P.S. This article has been translated from the vendor M-Files website as an example of platform implementation.
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