netLex VisionHow Porto do Açu's legal team doubled demand volume in one year, supporting Latin America's largest private port operation
The partnership between Porto do Açu and netLex can be summed up as the relentless pursuit of efficiency by a legal department — and it finds collaboration on both sides.”
About Porto do Açu
Porto do Açu is the largest private port complex in Latin America and Brazil's second largest port by cargo movement. Located in northern Rio de Janeiro state, it hosts the largest thermoelectric park in Latin America, and more than 30% of all crude oil produced in Brazil flows through it.
It is a critical operation for the Brazilian economy. Its clients include Petrobras (in the middle of decommissioning platforms), Wilson Sons (one of the largest and oldest tugboat and offshore support companies in the country) and Edison Chouest (which operates the world's largest offshore support base at the port). The entire Campos Basin receives some form of treatment, influence or service from this base.
An operation of this size generates an intense contract flow, with regulatory requirements that combine technical standards, international compliance and responsibility over critical infrastructure. Legal is not merely a guardian of risk — it is a strategic piece in a chain that affects the country's energy infrastructure.
Regulation is very complex at Porto do Açu and at every other port in Brazil. To meet every standard, every instruction, to avoid forgetting a particular clause that necessarily has to appear in every contract — whether to avoid an international sanction or to meet an ISO compliance standard — it is essential to have a centralizing contract management system that guarantees that, regardless of human action, what needs to be there will always be there.”
Key points
- The flow doubled in one year: an increase of more than 100% in the volume of legal demands handled
- The same team: service capacity per lawyer doubled
- No more demands “lost along the way”: every request has a traceable origin, a defined owner and a visible deadline
- Automated regulatory compliance: mandatory clauses guaranteed by default
Organizing a flow that lived “over coffee”
Before netLex, Porto do Açu's legal team worked in a scenario any corporate legal professional will recognize: demands did not arrive through a structured channel. They arrived in the hallway, over coffee, in the middle of a meeting — and vanished between one conversation and the next.
With no formal intake flow, the team lost visibility over who had requested what, when, with what deadline and which legal instrument was the right one. A request described informally as “some contract” could be an NDA, an MOU or a term sheet, and legal had to decode the request before it could start working on it.
That carried two concrete costs:
The first was operational: rework, missed deadlines, that awkward conversation in which the requester, or a manager, turned up days later asking for the contract nobody had formally recorded.
The second was strategic: in an operation exposed to international sanctions and ISO standards, a mandatory clause forgotten in a contract is not an administrative slip, it is risk exposure.
An MOU draft, an NDA, some contract, requested over coffee, in the middle of a meeting. A week later the requester turned up at your desk, or worse, a manager, saying: ‘where is my contract?’ That is not exactly the kind of situation we like to face.”
There is also a cultural dimension. Corporate legal deals with technical language (MOU, term sheet, NDA) that is not the domain of the commercial or the procurement team. Nor should it be. The problem is that, without a system to translate that language, the business areas end up dependent on legal just to understand what they are asking for — which stiffens the operation and creates friction in cycles that need to be fast.
Why is a “contract management system” more than a repository?
A repository stores documents. A CLM (Contract Lifecycle Management) manages the entire contract lifecycle, from the initial request through standardized creation, approvals, signature and post-signature management, all the way to KPIs about the operation. For a legal department exposed to heavy regulatory compliance, that difference is not semantic: it is the difference between organizing the past and having control over the present.
Centralize the flow, give the business areas autonomy, measure the operation
With netLex, Porto do Açu redesigned the contract process around three fronts.
The logic: digitizing a confusing flow achieves nothing, it has to be structured first.
- Centralized demand intake: every legal request now enters through a single channel inside the platform. What used to be an informal conversation became a record with origin, owner, deadline and status visible to everyone. Nobody has to ask “where is my contract?” any more, the answer is on the screen;
- Standardization with clarity for non-lawyers: for each type of demand, the platform presents the right legal instrument, with clauses already approved by legal and labels in business language. The commercial team does not need to know the technical difference between an MOU, a term sheet and an NDA — netLex explains, guides and delivers the right option. It builds culture without requiring formal training;
- Real-time KPI extraction: with the whole operation concentrated on a single platform, Porto do Açu gained real-time dashboards: demand volume, average handling time, bottlenecks by contract type, performance per lawyer. The conversation about the legal operation stopped depending on perception and started resting on numbers.
netLex separates everything that can be requested and brings clarity when it comes to explaining it. It creates culture. The requesters themselves, over time, start checking that and internalizing it. If everything is in the same place — the word of the corporate world is alignment — and that greatly favors alignment among the people who need to work on it.”
Results and impact
Implementing netLex brought concrete changes to the operational capacity and the strategic profile of Porto do Açu's legal department:
- The flow doubled in one year: an increase of more than 100% in the volume of legal demands handled in the same period, year over year;
- The same team: all of that growth was absorbed without expanding the team. Service capacity per lawyer doubled;
- No more demands “lost along the way”: every request has a traceable origin, a defined owner and a visible deadline. “Where is my contract?” stopped being part of the routine;
- Autonomy for the business areas: Commercial, Procurement and Operations began opening demands with confidence, using the right legal instruments without having to master the terminology;
- Automated regulatory compliance: mandatory clauses in contracts are now guaranteed by default — critical in an operation exposed to ISO standards and international sanctions;
- Data-driven management: real-time KPIs became the basis for strategic conversations about the department's growth, the pace of expansion and team sizing;
When you extrapolate to other netLex tools, related to real-time data extraction, KPIs — in our case, for example, [we had] an increase of more than 100% in the flow of demands in the same period, year over year. That is substrate enough to discuss the subject, internally and externally. It is impressive how organized everything becomes, and it supports the famous cliché: what gets measured can be managed.”
Conclusion
More than a tool, netLex became the backbone of a legal department that matches the scale of the Porto do Açu complex. 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.
