• We spoke to… Patricia Domínguez, senior lawyer at iryo.
  • Sector: High-speed rail passenger transport.
  • Description: Iryo is a Spanish high-speed train company, a competitor of Renfe, which is reinventing the way we travel through its commitment to sustainability and technology. They offer a timely, efficient and safe service, focused on people and sustainable, digital connectivity.
  • Bounsel’s area of application: Legal department.

🤯 The problem

“It was very frustrating, there were a lot of paper contracts, they kept stamping and signing them by hand, checking every page…”. This is how Patricia began to tell us what her day-to-day life was like when she worked in the legal department of Renfe, before joining iryo. He acknowledges that it was clear to him that contract management could be “done in a much more digital and modern way”.

iryo is currently preparing for the launch of the Spanish business in November 2022 and manages a large volume of contracts for some 106 suppliers, each of these documents including annexes, addenda and purchase orders. All of this involves signatures from other team members, taking into account renewal dates, following the life cycle of contracts, adapting to changes in internal processes, and doing all of this manually was very difficult.

Patricia works in the legal department, side by side with the quality and purchasing department. When he joined the company he became aware of the “decontrol The “very good use case is that Bounsel would be “very good to use in the purchasing department” for more traceability of operations, as well as for reporting to senior management and finance, among other use cases.

🚀 The solution

After starting to use the tool, Patricia says that “with Bounsel it’s wonderful, you have everything organised, you give us the flexibility that we need internally”, especially because “the platform adapts to what we need at any given moment”.

Although he confesses to being an “excessively tidy person”, who files all documents and emails and organises them according to his own criteria, since using Bounsel “this is no longer necessary, with just one document you have the v1 version, the v2 version, the final version and the real final version”, and the whole team found it great that “at a glance you can see the status of all the documents without having to open, read and review them” every time they need them.

📑 Examples of the use of Bounsel in iryo contracts

They have started to upload all their contractual documentation to Bounsel in order to have it organised and updated in real time and securely in the cloud. In addition, they have created smart fields in the NDAs, as it is “very easy to fill in only the data I need, without touching the rest of the document”, which makes this repetitive work much quicker. They will also use it to automate the agreements they make with travel agencies.

On the other hand, they use attachments to have all the information organised and linked to the corresponding documentation. For example, “when we have a contract that has been extended, I upload it as an annex and change the validity, so that it is not expired” and so “we always have control of everything up to date”, Patricia says.

🙌 The team

Bounsel is a collaborative platform, so you can work with other team members and external users. At iryo, they have also taken advantage of this, using it to allow senior management, members of the finance and purchasing departments to approve, sign or follow up on contract processes.

And, although some of their colleagues were not used to signing online (they were still signing on paper!), the advanced electronic signature has given them a lot of security and they feel more and more “at ease” using it. Patricia tells us that she and Olga (legal director) are “corporate lawyers and you have to think about the business” and they have even reinforced their proposal, as they think that “it was time for the legal department to modernise”.

⚡ Benefits

We asked Patricia about the main benefits that Bounsel has brought her and she summed it up in one sentence: “Ease of work and absolute control of all documents”. He also added that Bounsel “makes his work more enjoyable”, “I found it very simple and easy to use”.
To conclude, he sends this message to other companies that are considering using Bounsel: “it is the best decision you can make, it is making my way of working and organising everything much easier, it is very simple and very practical”.

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