In 2017, William Deckelman, executive vice president and general counsel of DXC Technology, faced a towering task: Integrate two large legal departments, increase the number of company contracts processed, and do it faster and with far fewer resources.

To accomplish the task, Deckelman put his job on the line and made one of the gutsiest calls a GC could make. He created a new kind of legal department, totally redesigned around the needs of DXC, one of the world's leading IT service providers. For its courage, innovation and use of technology in building a law department of the future, dubbed “Legal 2.0,” DXC has been named one of the overall Best Legal Departments for 2018.

“Yes, it was risky,” Deckelman acknowledges. “But I didn't see any other path to meeting the cost target we had been given and still supporting the company as we were being asked to do.”
Most of DXC's lawyers chose to follow their GC's lead. A year later, the results have surprised even Deckelman and his boss, chairman and CEO Mike Lawrie. They include helping to save DXC some $1 billion by building more efficiencies into its supply chain and other areas of its operations, while supporting more than $26 billion worth of contracts.

Deckelman's path to legal transformation began when his former company, Computer Sciences Corp., merged with a division of Hewlett Packard Enterprise to form DXC in April 2017. To plan for the merger, Deckelman worked closely with legal services provider UnitedLex, with whom DXC eventually signed a five-year contract to restructure its legal department.

It was hailed as the first-ever partnership between a tech company and a legal services provider to provide seamless legal support for transactions, contracts, legal operations, litigation, immigration and other functions across 26 global jurisdictions. It has also been called the largest ever managed services transaction in the industry.

“We had to get comfortable with the risk tolerance,” Deckelman recalls. “I was able to get there because of the level of trust that had already built up with UnitedLex. I knew I could count on my partner, so, if things didn't go as planned, we would work through it together.”

But things went even better than planned, Deckelman says. DXC and UnitedLex designed and implemented an enterprise legal services model to drive material performance, reduce risk, advance strategic direction, increase the speed of business and reduce costs. At the center of it was UnitedLex's contract management platform that can process more than 65 million contracts a year.

“By the time we got to the April 1 merger date, we had done so much planning that we were confident going into the merger itself that it would work,” Deckelman says.

The plan involved “rebadging” 225 DXC attorneys and professionals to UnitedLex, which now employs 250 senior attorneys, contract and commercial professionals, engineers and other subject matter experts to support DXC globally. The move meant DXC reduced its legal staff from 525 lawyers to 125.

The changes cut operational costs by 30 percent while retaining institutional knowledge, Deckelman says. DXC also cut outside counsel spend by 20 percent.

Though it's only been about a year, and something conceivably could still go wrong with the ambitious department revamp, CEO Lawrie says so far he has seen significant improvements.

“First of all, we make most of our deadlines,” Lawrie says. That's one noticeable difference. I am also able to get more tasks completed in the same amount of time, and the quality is at least as good as before, if not better.”

Lawrie explains wryly that “fundamentally, I get better discipline, and we all know lawyers aren't real good at discipline to begin with.”

The CEO is especially fond of several technology platforms that came with the UnitedLex deal. There is now a central process for all department communications, such as project management initiatives, training materials and team calendar. And UnitedLex added technology to enhance global monitoring, reporting and management of outside counsel spend.

Lawrie says his favorite addition is the contract management system. “Our primary mission is providing service to clients, and contracts are a very important part of our company,” he says. “Their contract management platform would have taken me years and a lot of money to get.”

The CEO admits his business is not lawyering and that the platform is “merely a tool.” But he says he has noticed fewer complaints from clients and employees.

“We have thousands of contracts and 150,000-plus people employed across 60 some countries. We seem to be getting better expertise, more efficiency and better quality,” Lawrie says.

Mike Brito's business, however, is lawyering, and he joined DXC a year ago. “I wanted to work in a dynamic in-house environment,” he says. “And it has been everything I expected.”

As vice president of contracts and strategic transactions, a newly-created position at DXC, Brito says his role is to support any important DXC transaction, including the UnitedLex relationship.

“Mainly I manage risk in the portfolio of contracts,” he explains. “We are in the business of providing services to customers, so the company's real assets are its contracts—billions of dollars of contracts, with thousands of customers all over the world.”

DXC is based in Tysons Corner, Virginia, but Brito is based in Dallas. He stays in touch daily through Skype and other technology and travels often. “I'm in Tysons Corner two to three weeks a month and travel to other countries, as well,” he says.

Brito says one reason the merger went so smoothly is that DXC and UnitedLex view themselves as a joint legal department, not as two separate departments working together. “In our first year, no one has said that this deal got dropped or that something got missed,” he says.

He also credits an extremely talented and experienced legal team that includes former HP lawyers. Brito says his nature is “not overly optimistic and usually cautious.” But he has found the innovations at DXC to be “energizing.”

DXC is in the process of expanding the scope of its relationship with UnitedLex. For example, Brito says the company looks at transactions in categories from “A” to “E,” with “A” being the highest, valued at $100 million or above. They are usually also the most complex, and the most important clients, so DXC originally kept the “A” transactions in-house.

But over the past year, he says, “because of our increasing confidence, we decided to expand the scope of UnitedLex to include Category A.”

DXC is also making other moves. For example, in May it spun off its public sector business unit and merged it with two other IT service companies, Vencore Holding Corp. and KeyPoint Government Solutions, to form an independent company named Perspecta. DXC's associate general counsel, Jim Gallagher, joined Perspecta as its general counsel, and took several DXC lawyers with him. Deckelman says the spinoff was “a lot of work” for his legal department.

So what's next for DXC and Deckelman's team? “I don't know,” Deckelman says, “but with Mike Lawrie you never stand still.