Cenza

Introduction:

Cenza has experience handling contract management projects in all business sectors, from banking to insurance to energy exploration. Each assignment comes with a unique set of challenges, but with our workflow expertise and state-of the-art technology, we excel in bringing the highest degree of accuracy to bear in analyzing and summarizing each client’s contract data, working to scale, no matter what the industry happens to be.

The Client:

• The world’s leading banks turn to Cenza for contract management help

A top-tier global bank operating in more than 80 countries worldwide. After a series of mergers, which combined disparate technology platforms, the bank was looking to establish a global contract database, populated with more than 40,000 active agreements.

The Challenge:

• Providing the data so the client can better assess global risk

Although all the contracts were going to be stored in a single repository, the client had only limited access to meaningful data and limited understanding of financial risk across the entire organization, tied either to particular counterparties, commodities or other potentially significant credit events. Our assignment was to help the client create a contract and risk data matrix and then analyze all 40,000 contracts based on that schema, to enrich the search capability of the contract database.

The Solution:

• Building a schema for analyzing client contract data
• A meticulous process to ensure quality control

40,000 contracts are a lot to review and summarize. But the journey of contract management always starts the same way by constructing a data matrix. Here are the key steps we followed:

• Analyze the different contract types, which in this case involved up to 100 different agreement types, such as loans, guarantees, swaps, derivatives, etc., in many cases with multiple versions and regional variations.
• Assemble a team of attorneys experienced in banking and finance. Working with the client’s in-house team, they are tasked with developing a data scheme that covers each contract type. The team also develops guidelines for data abstraction in each category. This work product is then reviewed, revised and approved by the client.
• Then we launch a pilot test to evaluate how the data schema and project guidelines perform in action. After training, an initial team begins reviewing and abstracting multiple batches of contracts, and their work product gets carefully scored for accuracy. After each batch, the guidelines are fine tuned to improve accuracy on the next batch. On this project, we ran 7 batches of test data until we were satisfied we had achieved a suitable accuracy scoring.
• Live operations commence with a core team whose performance is carefully monitored. The document delivery rate is gradually increased and the team expanded in order to achieve the target run rate, while our quality review team continuously monitors performance.

The Impact:

• Delivering long term value through improved risk management

The client emphasized to us that data accuracy is absolutely critical for purposes of performing global risk assessment. That’s why we took such pains every step of the way, and ended up exceeding the client’s requirements with a cumulative quality assessment scoring above the 98th percentile. We completed the assignment on time and with an estimated cost savings of more than 35% below what the client’s internal cost would have been. The real payoff for the client came two years after we completed the assignment. Our project manager received a call from the client explaining how valuable our services turned out to be. When a large counterparty had gone into bankruptcy, thanks to the accuracy of Cenza’s work, management had been able to respond quickly and decisively mitigated its losses. Contract management when done properly provides a long-term benefit in risk management that goes beyond the immediate ROI. It shows up in ongoing improvement to a company’s bottom line, long after the project is done.

Introduction :

Outsourcing word processing represents low hanging fruit for law firms that want to achieve operational cost savings. It is a low-risk strategy, which can be implemented in a relatively short time frame, without any loss in the quality of service and usually without any disruption to existing operations. Discover how Cenza can help your firm capitalize on this huge cost-saving opportunity today.

The Client :

An AmLaw 50 law firm with more than 750 lawyers and 13 office locations around the country. The firm had already taken substantial steps to centralize its back office functions by establishing an onshore operations center but it was looking to expand its word processing capabilities and achieve greater savings by moving a portion of its word processing operation offshore.

• A simple strategy for cost-reduction for mid-size and large law firms.

The Challenge :

In truth, when it comes to outsourcing word processing, it’s not really a challenge for us any more. For more than 15 years we have been leaders in the outsourcing field, which has enabled us to streamline the process and take the guesswork out of bringing a new client onboard. For law firms that already have a centralized word processing operation in place, we have made a science out of establishing a seamless workflow between your word processing team, dispersed across your domestic and international offices, and our operations center.

The Solution :

From initial inquiry, to onsite project assessment, to launching of a pilot project, the timeline for onboarding a new client is usually compressed into just [30-60 days]. At each step, our focus on quality control management ensures that clients don’t experience any deterioration in the service level along the way.

• Project kickoff starts with an onsite and/or virtual by our project manager. Our project managers bring a wealth of operational experience (with 20 plus years in word processing and operations management) in conducting a top down assessment of the client’s operating environment and project requirements.
• Before work begins we establish a secure communications link between the client and our operations center to ensure client documents and data at all times will be handled in accordance with our rigorous data security framework, certified for compliance under ISO/IEC 27001:2013 standards.
• Through our standard intake process, we collect information and materials needed to prepare document templates to the client’s specification across all document types. We organize a dedicated team of word processors and proofreaders based on project requirements.
• Onsite project assessment and management.
• Highly secure communications protocol.
• Matching each Client’s document Types and specs.
• A pilot to prove Quality control.

The Impact :

Cenza is ready to go live with our offshore operation in less than 60 days after being engaged. Over the course of the ensuing months the client gradually increased its reliance on the Cenza word processing team. By the end of the first year of operations it was able to achieve its targeted savings, through onshore headcount adjustment, which resulted in direct cost reduction at an annualized rate in excess of $1,000,000.

Introduction :

High stakes litigation today requires parties to build their cases based on an enormous quantity of documents, emails and data. The difference between winning and losing depends on your team’s ability to have ready command over the voluminous evidence so you can master the complexity and can have easy access to the right exhibits when you need them.

The Client :

A large group of plaintiffs had sued two Saudi businesses (including Al-Saena of the Saad Group) in a Cayman Island court based on claims involving a massive financial fraud. More than a dozen law firms and accounting firms were cooperating in bringing the case on behalf of a consortium of 118 bank lenders. By order of the Cayman Island’s court, the plaintiffs were required to combine their efforts and share the cost in assembling a document repository as part of the preparation for trial. The documents set included the complete bank statements for the defendants from all 118 lenders. An RFP was circulated to leading document management vendors who had the requisite expertise in analyzing and coding financial records in order to build an easily searchable repository. Based on our extensive experience and competitive rates, Cenza was selected as winning bidder among the 12 responding vendors.

The Challenge :

When we were retained on this project, the Cayman Island court had already set a trial date, which left us with a short window of less than 12 months to undertake the review, coding and database entry of more than 400,000 documents that covered more than 6,000,000 financial transactions. The documents required OCR, unitization and coding with up to 12 fields to provide sufficient detail for forensic accounting purposes. Due to the nature of underlying claims, the coding work on this project required an extremely high degree of accuracy so that the plaintiffs could properly reconstruct the complex trail of fraudulent transactions.

The Solution :

A project of this scope requires an efficient and complex workflow that can be scaled to handle huge throughput. Cenza customized and deployed its proprietary document-coding platform to facilitate the collaboration of the client working group that spanned the world. And we assembled an offshore team of 80 associates, including QA specialists, a workflow specialist and a project manager to handle the bulk of the document coding and review. In the first pass our coding team was able to accurately review and code 400,000 records. Our internal quality control team then conducted a second-level review of 65,000 documents that had been flagging during the initial review. Throughout the process, the offshore team worked in close collaboration with the client team to troubleshoot and properly resolve all document and coding exceptions. Over the course of the project, our team exceeded the clients’ requirements by maintaining an accuracy rating above 98%. The project workflow also enabled us to achieve steady gains in productivity as work progressed. After nearly five months and almost 7000 hours of team effort, Cenza delivered the clients and their counsel a database, enriched with meta-data covering the entire set of 400,000 documents.

The Impact :

In the world of litigation we have the chance to see our work contribute directly to our clients’ courtroom success. In this case, the Cayman Island courts returned a resounding guilty verdict against the defendants for defrauding our clients of $126 billion. The high accuracy of our team’s coding effort played a critical role in helping our clients prevail at trial. Not only that but we delivered savings of more than 30% compared to the clients’ anticipated cost for handling the same work on shore.

Introduction :

Managing title review for a major real estate law firm – when real estate professionals need help organizing, reviewing and abstracting large volumes of real estate documentation, they turn to Cenza as a highly trusted outsourcing partner with the requisite expertise.

The Assignment:

Our client is a leading Canadian law firm with a national network that specializes in handling a high volume of residential real estate transactional matters. The firm was in the process of building a database for the storage and retrieval of more than 27,000 title documents relating to all its clients. The project specifications required that the title documents all be reviewed, analyzed and summarized in order to capture detailed information about the rights, obligations and restrictions pertaining to the non-financial land title charges for each client property. The project goal was to provide staff with ready access to a short synopsis for each land title record.

The Challenge:

The large volume of land title documents that needed to be reviewed and summarized posed a threshold problem. The client’s legal staff couldn’t be diverted from more important revenue generating tasks. This was a compelling case for pursuing an outsourced solution but only if the review teams possessed the requisite expertise to ensure the document summaries would be sufficiently accurate.

The Solution:

Cenza’s real estate document review teams are staffed 100% by qualified attorneys with extensive real estate and contract management experience, including That’s the fundamental reason the client chose to work with us and that’s why Cenza has become a leader in providing document review services to the real estate industry in the US, Canada and the UK real estate domain expertise combined with excellent communication skills.

In this case, given the high volume of documents, we assembled a review team of 10 Real Estate lawyers and established a security framework that enabled our team, working in a dedicated and locked down area of our facility, to operate inside the client’s firewall in order to maintain the highest level of data security.
Through close collaboration with the client, we designed a customized workflow to support a highly efficient, cost effective and high quality process for document review and summary, which provided for three tiers of quality control. Our legal team performed the initial review and summary utilizing templates that we created to ensure consistent summarization. After that our Quality Review team reviewed the document abstracts to ensure they were prepared consistently and in accordance with project requirements. The project manager was then responsible for a final audit of all the title charges. Throughout the review process, any issues or questions in the title documents regarding missing pages, illegible titles and title effective dates, were promptly escalated to the client’s in-house team.

Even with the three layers of review, we were able to meet the client’s deadline by completing the summary of 27,092 title charges in the less than 5500 hours from the kickoff of the project. Client renewed the project as part of the extension and it is now an ongoing project.

The Impact:

Outsourcing provides a powerful solution for the management and review of real estate legal documentation in high volume. In this case Cenza was able to keep the client on track and under budget in establishing and maintain on ongoing basis their internal title charge database.

• By outsourcing the client realized an estimated savings of 35-40% in the project cost.
• The client’s legal team was freed up to focus on revenue generating tasks.
• Our solution resulted in the client obtaining a streamlined document management system, including sequential filing, a file naming convention and source information, all provided

If you’re confronting a similar challenge, with a large volume of real estate documentation needing review, whether as part of due diligence for an M&A transaction or an internal audit process, contact Cenza to find out how we can tailor a similar solution for you.