+60% in the volume of documents created over 12 months, same turnaround

Before netLex, the operation lived with concrete barriers:

• No culture of formalization: the business areas did not see why to formalize anything, from a contract to a supplier notice;
• Variety with no standard: powers of attorney, amendments, service agreements, NDAs, health and safety notices, R&D agreements. Each instrument followed its own path, with no single template;
• Scattered information: safety notices, for example, lived on each user's computer. There was no consolidated view by unit;
• Resistance from the business areas: legal language pushed away the very people who needed to use the process. A power of attorney looked like bureaucracy; a deadline of days, an exaggeration;
• Pressure to scale: demand volume was growing, and expanding the team in the same proportion was not the path.

netLex came in as a single layer of governance, and each feature answered a pain.

The contract now starts from a questionnaire. Instead of dealing with clauses, the user answers questions and the document comes out already in the standard. That removed the barrier of legal language and standardized instruments that used to follow loose paths. Governance became embedded in the flow itself: Gerdau's guidelines turned into requirements inside the questionnaire, and every step must be completed before conclusion.

Approval workflows brought visibility. Each area tracks status and SLA without chasing legal by email. And the Intelligence dashboards gave legal what was missing: a management view. One example became an internal reference — the health and safety notices dashboard, which consolidated by unit the information previously scattered, with a ranking of contractors.

The result fits in one sentence: more volume, the same turnaround.

The volume of documents created grew more than 60% over 12 months. Over the same period, the median time to flow completion stayed practically stable, around 14 days, year after year. Of the flows that reach the end, 89% are completed. Scaling without lengthening the cycle is the opposite of what is expected from a department seen as a bottleneck.

And all of it without growing the team. Around six lawyers sustain an operation that now records hundreds of documents per month. Adoption followed: monthly active use rose consistently and internal promotion stopped being pushed, leaders began to see value in the data and took the platform to their own teams.

The culture of formalization became a habit, to the point that the number of notices exceeded the number of amendments requested. In health and safety, a non-negotiable principle at Gerdau, the dashboard built in the first year of operation became the basis for the safety committee's monthly meetings.