SEE Group is an Australian owned, family run business that has more than 30 years success in the civil construction industry. SEE Group comprises of a number of businesses being:

• SEE Civil that deliver construction and engineering services for major infrastructure and urban development clientele, providing solutions across NSW and Queensland over a range of industries. SEE Civil takes on diverse and challenging projects, with their extensive experience across the depth and breadth of the civil construction, including road and transport infrastructure, water and utilities, mining, rail and airside construction as well as construction for residential, commercial and industrial developments.

• Civil Rent which comprises of a large fleet of plant and equipment, hiring to various clientele as well as servicing the delivery of many of SEE Civil’s projects; and

• Quarry Solutions which is a quarrying business which provides resources to SEE Civil’s projects and clientele all across Australia.

Kirrilly Gordon is the Group Commercial and Legal Manager at SEE Group, with over sixteen years’ experience in both private practice and in-house roles specialising in construction and property law, Kirrilly leverages her extensive knowledge and commercial acumen to ensure beneficial outcomes to global and national stakeholders across the Company’s projects.

“SEE Group is a civil engineering company working for a wide range of clients specialising in civil and urban infrastructure, mining, quarrying, rental and plant and equipment.

The current operating environment

The current economic environment post-covid is challenging, but we are responding well. We build various risk allocations into our contracts and pricing when we tender for new projects. Escalation of material and labor has been a challenge for the construction industry recently. We negotiate clauses with our clients to allow for equitable entitlements for escalation and rise and fall where appropriate.

The SEE Group Legal Team

We are a team of three, with myself as the Group Commercial and Legal Manager, Yen Do as Legal Counsel, and Hallie Jetson as our Commercial Administrator. We service all the different aspects of the business, from the inception of a contract at tender stage, to set up of a project, through to delivery and completion with various touch points throughout the business. We regularly sit with various business units to understand and discuss their needs to ensure we can deliver the best outcome for all.

We are continually upskilling each member of the Commercial and Legal team to assist the business more widely. So, for example, Yen our Legal Counsel was recently seconded to one of our major rail JV projects, Trans4m Rail, for a period of time to assist this project which has provided her with more exposure and understanding of the day-to-day happenings in projects from a commercial and legal perspective. We also undertake regular educational training on key legal issues affecting construction for the wider business. Our team attends various seminars throughout the year on construction to continue to stay abreast of law and industry changes.

The challenges

Before Dazychain, the Commercial Legal Team utilised Sharepoint.The Sharepoint folders are divided into business units and projects. Whilst this works for the wider business it presents challenges for the Commercial and Legal team with filing and tracking matters, correspondence, reporting and expenditure. Consequently, we needed something that was more efficient and effective from a record keeping, reporting and resource management perspective to help us run our matters more smoothly, which is what Dazychain really offered us.

Using Dazychain now

We can track our costs, share our documents easily, and invite external lawyers in to review documents and matters. We can easily assign tasks to people. We can keep registers of documents and matters, which is not something our team had when I entered the business previously, which assists, for example, the business with corporate governance and audits.

Dazychain helps us to structure our matters and information, allowing us to identify to the business what potential risks that are or may be arising. Consequently, because we are using Dazychain, we can see patterns occurring, for example, what matters are coming up more in terms of different disputes or claims that may arise in various aspects of our projects, and then how we can look at managing those matters proactively. Dazychain gives us a clearer overall picture of what is happening in the business.

How Dazychain is different from SharePoint

We are saving at least two hours a week per person, or probably more, using Dazychain. Because while we have SharePoint, we have to request access then scroll through the different files, for each business unit, with unique file structures, which works for them, but it is hard when you are looking for a specific document. So, now we have everything in Dazychain, under the entities, and then under the disciplines that we use. We then use our deliverables in Dazychain to deal with our sub-folder in a matters too. This has made things more streamlined giving us back more time in our day.

Dazychain dashboards and reporting

We use our dashboards and reports for monthly reports to the executive team. The data allows us to identify key matters that are high risk to the business at a point in time.

Increasing efficiency and transparency

Dazychain has increased the number of matters we can manage. Prior to me starting at SEE Group the Commercial and Legal Team consisted of a team of 4. We now sit at a team of 3 and the business has grown extensively during this time, doubling our team’s workload, but it has been managed well largely due to the visibility, tracking and efficiencies Dazychain provides. If we did not have Dazychain, we would find it challenging to keep track of information, matters, and emails, which is important because we need all of these as reference points saved on a matter.

Why Dazychain?

Dazychain makes a difference to how our team functions within the business. In my previous role, in a different business, we were looking at trying to implement Dazychain. We were advocating very hard for that because it was just the most efficient and effective product on the market that solved the legal team’s challenges with not just document storage but managing matters, and legal team resource allocation. Dazychain makes a difference. There is not a lot in the market that gives you what Dazychain does to adequately manage what you need for smaller corporate legal teams at a cost-effective price point.

Key features of legal matter management with Dazychain

The best part of Dazychain is that you can send comments to people in your team about the status of a matter. This then links that team member to the matter so that they do not have to go in and search for the file. I like that I can create deliverables, which I utilise as sub-folders which allows me to easily find the documents in a matter. Another function that I find handy is that when I open a file I can add details about the matter type, business unit, and the region, because that makes it easier to search, and to create similar matters in the future for accurate reporting.

Advice for those about to embark on cloud-based legal matter management

Effectively setting up and utilising a software platform such as Dazychain revolves around understanding your business, your internal and external stakeholders, and the key items that come up on a regular basis, then structuring your matters to suit the business. If you have set up the system appropriately in Dazychain, it is very easy to rinse and repeat on those matters that you will see on a regular basis. It saves a lot of time using mandatory and pre-filled fields. Your precedents and templates are already there when you open a file. It is already set up for you and it is just a matter of populating the additional information.

Managing the transition to a legal matter management system

Managing the transition to Dazychain was easy for us. The Dazychain team sat down with us and asked us about our business structure, what we needed to cover off on in terms of reporting for our business units, what type of advice we are usually giving, so that they could then configure the platform for us, so that when we were opening a matter for that topic or business unit, it is seamless.”