netLex Vision−80% in the average signature process time
You have to be close to the business, understand the business and its impact. Legal is a partner to the business, and netLex is the main ally in that.”
Saint-Gobain and a legal department in transformation
Saint-Gobain is one of the largest building materials companies in the world, with an operation that supports everything from infrastructure works to data centers and hospitals. In Brazil, legal sits at the center of that machine, with Purchasing and Procurement as its main internal client — the area that concentrates the largest volume of contracts and the most sensitive negotiations.
Adopting netLex was not an isolated technology project. It is part of a broader transformation of the legal department, aligned with the transformation of the business itself — as with the Lead & Grow project, which brings the company's brands together to serve large construction works and takes the operation to a more complex level. In that context, legal seeks to demonstrate its relevance no longer through the operational volume it executes, but through the strategic value it supports.
Key points
- −80% in the average signature process time
- +156% in total signature requests (from 202 to 518 per month)
- A legal service SLA of 96.8%, with 271 of 280 steps completed on time
- The registered user base grew from 5 in December 2025 to 332 in June 2026
Listening, simplification and flow review
Technology was the last step of the transformation, not the first. Before putting any flow live, Saint-Gobain's legal department prepared the ground.
First, it listened to internal clients to understand the real pains of the business areas before designing any process. Then it simplified and standardized the templates — the condition for autonomy to be possible without creating risk. Finally, it reviewed the flows and approval authority levels, redesigning the path of each contract before automating it.
Only then came digitization with netLex, with a clear objective: expanding the autonomy of the business areas without giving up legal security and governance.
Giving the business areas autonomy without losing control
The starting point was a scenario of decentralized, manual controls, common in high-volume legal operations:
- Contracts controlled in Excel spreadsheets, with litigation in a separate system and no single view of the operation;
- KPIs assembled manually: slow, unreliable work that made it hard to see where the bottleneck was;
- Excessive volume reaching legal, because the value threshold sent even the simplest demands to the team for analysis;
- Limited traceability, with heavy dependence on manual validation and little evidence of who did what and when;
- Cultural resistance: the classic “it has always been this way” that tends to block the adoption of any change in the business areas.
The question that guided the project was direct: how do you give the business areas more autonomy without losing control over what genuinely requires legal's eye?
netLex inside a broader journey
With the ground prepared, three moves reorganized the contract operation:
- Controlled autonomy: business areas began creating simple contracts through self-service, by questionnaire, while legal kept control over the flows that genuinely require analysis. That relieved the team of the volume that used to arrive because of the value threshold.
- Embedded governance: approval and authority rules stopped depending on manual validation and became part of the contract flow itself, with no way around internal policy. Every step is recorded, with a complete audit trail.
- Centralization and intelligence: drafting, approval, signature and data came to live on a single platform, with native dashboards replacing manual spreadsheets. Signature in particular gained netLex Sign, which brought the step into the same flow and eliminated back-and-forth over email.
Each front answered a specific pain: autonomy attacked the excess volume, embedded governance solved traceability, and centralization replaced the manual effort of assembling indicators.
More speed, more volume and governance over the data
The figures below come from netLex's Intelligence dashboards, covering January to July 2026 (go-live in January).
The clearest gain is in the average signature process time, which fell from 15 to 3 days (−80%) over the period. The month-by-month evolution shows a consistent downward trend, and the speed gain held even as the load increased: on the more conservative quarterly cut, average time fell around 63% (from 13.3 to 5 days) while request volume rose 33% over the same interval.
And the volume genuinely grew: total signature requests went from 202 to 518 per month (+156%). Faster and with more load at the same time — the argument that sustains the case.
Governance kept pace. The legal service SLA stood at 96.8%, with 271 of 280 steps completed on time. And drafting standardized templates became immediate: generated automatically by the platform, with no manual step, across almost two thousand records in the period.
Behind all of it is adoption. The registered user base jumped from 5 in December 2025 to 332 in June 2026, with a peak of 142 active users in a month and an average of 40.8 logins per business day. Autonomy shows up in the data: most of the volume began flowing through self-service, without needing legal, while legal analysis grew in a controlled way, concentrated where it genuinely adds value.
Conclusion
The transformation of Saint-Gobain's legal department began before the technology: in listening, in simplification and in reviewing the flows. netLex gave that journey scale, with autonomy, governance and speed evolving together. The result is a legal department that stops reacting and starts leading: closer to the business, supported by reliable data and ready for what comes next.
