Vodafone Global Enterprise has overhauled its in-house legal team through an 18-month transformation project that has seen the company introduce new technology and set up several offshore teams.

The changes at Vodafone's corporate-focused subsidiary, which provides telecoms solutions to large multinationals such as Unilever, Volkswagen and The Linde Group,  have been overseen by legal director Kerry Phillip (pictured), who started the process six months after being appointed in September 2014.

The transformation – codenamed 'The Lego Project' – has seen the number of people in Phillip's team increasing from 35 lawyers in 2014 to a wider group of 80 today, around 50 of whom are lawyers.

The expansion, which has seen staff brought into the team from other departments as well as external recruitment, means the global team now includes contract managers, regulatory compliance and risk specialists and a newly created operations team, as well as lawyers.

As part of the process, Phillip is now making use of two offshore legal teams – one in Delhi and one in Budapest.

The Delhi offering sees the company contract seven full-time lawyers at Indian law firm Qui Prior Law Associates in Delhi to work full time on Vodafone matters.

Meanwhile, in Budapest, Phillip has taken on a different team from Enterprise to create a 12-person team in the Hungarian capital.

She told Legal Week: "What this transformation has meant for the onshore team is a separation of the standard and low complexity work from the more complex work.  By stripping out the standard and low complexity work and moving it offshore, the onshore team has had time alongside managing the more complex contracts to focus on getting the basics right – improving process, contract templates, guidance notes and self-service, and getting ready for automation."

Vodafone is now adding into the mix new contract management technology from Riverview Law, called KIM, which is also expected to free up lawyer time for more complicated work by making more straightforward contracting more efficient.

The technology could eventually be adopted by other parts of the Vodafone business.

Phillip said: "We are focusing on KIM for Enterprise contracting only at the moment because consumer contracting poses different challenges. But this is just the starting point…eventually we are hopeful that we will use KIM across Vodafone's markets for contracting activities."

Other changes Phillip has overseen during the past two years include brokering an agreement with contract lawyer service LOD.

"When the demand for legal resource is very high, it is handy to have an experienced overflow mechanism with a firm that knows our business and how we work. We also usually have one or two law firm secondees at any one time, who are experienced and are incredibly valuable to us."

Phillip, who trained and qualified as a corporate lawyer at Linklaters, joined Vodafone in 2010 as head of legal for Vodafone UK, before taking on the global legal director role for Enterprise. She also manages Vodafone's panel of external law firm advisers.