netLex VisionMagalu: more scale, the same governance and contract cycle time from 176 to 20 business days
Implementing netLex raised the level of contract management at Magalu. We went from 100% operational work to a flow that is secure, efficient and delivers results.”
Magalu and legal at high scale
When people say Magalu, they are not talking about a brand — they are talking about a group. More than 25 companies run under the same operation: Netshoes, Época, KaBuM!, aiqfome, Estante Virtual and Magalu Cloud, among others. Together they form a multi-business ecosystem that moves more than R$ 60 billion a year and spans over 1,200 stores.
All of those fronts converge on a single legal contracts team. Logistics, technology, real estate, marketing, finance, marketplace and several others: each vertical generates contractual demand, and all of it passes through the same team. Sustaining that operation at scale, without holding the business back, is the daily challenge for Magalu’s legal department.
Key points
- 89% less cycle time in the contract flow, from 176 to around 20 business days
- From 8 to 444 legal analyses completed per month, without expanding the team
- 45,537 requests concentrated in a single flow, with an average SLA of 5.4 days
- Data-driven management, with volume by area and SLA by step in real time, replacing spreadsheets
Map the journey, simplify templates and win the business areas over
Technology was the last step of the transformation, not the first. Having netLex in day-to-day work was, in the team’s own words, a long-standing wish, recorded as far back as 2018. Between that wish and the signed contract, in 2023, came the groundwork.
The team mapped the contract journey end to end, identified where the bottlenecks were and reviewed the flows before automating. It standardized the most recurrent templates so that technology would not digitize improvisation. And it invested heavily in culture change: for people used to resolving everything by email or message, adopting a platform required a change of habit. netLex was promoted across the company, even on the screens in the buildings, until it became the new normal.
Scaling legal without losing control
For years, the operation ran on improvisation. Requests arrived through loose emails, messages and other channels, 100% decentralized and often with incomplete data. With no single point of entry, measuring how many demands the team received, or how long it took to answer each one, depended on spreadsheets filled in by hand.
Storage sat in one tool and signature in another. A single contract went through email, chat, a signature platform and a repository: four disconnected environments for one task. The result was predictable: alignment bottlenecks with the business areas, low visibility into deadlines and queue, and traceability dependent on manual validation.
In a group that contracts all the time, every blind spot cost time and risk. The paradox of the Magalu ecosystem was clear: a sea of opportunities for strategic work, drowned by an avalanche of operational demands. The question that guided the project was direct: how do you give legal scale without giving up governance?
netLex in an integrated journey
The answer was not to digitize the old process, but to rethink the whole flow. With netLex, Magalu built a single path, from first contact to management after signature, in which each step answers a specific pain.
- Smart intake: the entry point stopped being email and became a structured form that standardizes the request and puts an end to incomplete data.
- Interfaces and approval: the flow automatically connects the governance areas — Compliance, InfoSec, Privacy and CSC — eliminating alignment bottlenecks.
- Drafting, signature and management: drafting preserves the template history and embeds digital signature in the same environment. After that, a central repository concentrates everything, with traceability of obligations, deadlines and renewals.
On that foundation, the team automated the most recurrent templates into ready-made models, such as service agreements and supply contracts, and the repetitive work started to flow.
More speed, and governance over the data
The numbers were audited in netLex’s own dashboards, between February 2024 and August 2026, and they tell a story of growth with control.
Having netLex in our day-to-day work was a long-standing wish. Today it is the backbone of our contract operation, from the first request to the signature.”
Over that period, 45,537 requests entered legal — all of the ecosystem’s demand concentrated in one place. The team now completes between 400 and 550 new legal analyses per month, work that requires sustained legal involvement, with a peak of 546. The trajectory is the most eloquent data point: the monthly average of analyses jumped from 8, in the first quarter of use, to 444 in the second quarter of 2026. Legal multiplied its capacity without expanding the team, because the ready-made templates absorbed the repetitive volume.
And it accelerated while growing. The cycle time of a given contract workflow fell 89%, from 176 business days on average in the first 2024 flows to a level of around 20 days in 2025. Legal’s average SLA settled at 5.4 days. For the first time, management became data-driven: native dashboards show volume by company and by area, the most active requesters, throughput per lawyer and SLA by step, in real time, in place of the old spreadsheets.
Conclusion
More than a tool, netLex became the backbone of a legal department that matches the scale of the Magalu group. By bringing scale, speed and governance into a single flow, the department stopped being seen as a bottleneck and took on a new role: partner to the business. It was the long-standing wish of 2018, now translated into numbers.
