Legal Process Outsourcing for Procurement: 88% more contractual capacity without increasing legal costs
How Alster helped a legal management to accompany the growth of Purchasing and Supply with a scalable service model.
The challenge
The growth of business often brings a direct consequence for legal management: more suppliers, purchase orders and contracts to be reviewed in increasingly demanding time frames.
Five years ago, the legal management of a forest company in Chile faced this scenario. The contractual demand for Procurement increased steadily, but the legal equipment did not have the capacity to absorb it internally or the budget to increase the strength or expenditure on external signatures.
The challenge was to accompany the pace of Purchasing and Supply without turning legal review into a bottleneck, maintaining control, legal quality and predictable costs.
The solution of Alster
The company implemented together with Alster a model of Legal Process Outsourcing (LPO) to manage procurement contracts from review to signature.
Alster began to operate as an extension of legal management, with a defined monthly capacity, shared working criteria and continuous monitoring of performance. The aim was not only to resolve applications, but to progressively improve the way in which contract demand was managed.
In 2021, the operation processed approximately 150 contracts and requirements per month. Each task required on average 26.1 minutes and productivity reached 2.3 tasks per hour of service. To sustain growth without expanding the structure, the process needed to be made more efficient.
A model based on continuous improvement
For five years, Alster and the customer introduced improvements aimed at reducing friction and simplifying decisions:
| Contractual risk matrix | Documentary standardization | Playbook de contracting |
| It allowed the classification of contracts and the definition of review routes according to their complexity. | I reduce the variability between negotiations and rework. | It accelerated recurrent decisions and reduced unnecessary steps. |
These actions helped to build a more predictable and scalable operation, aligned with the needs of Legal and Procurement.
Measurable results
Between 2021 and 2025, the model operated by Alster achieved the following results:
In the same period, the operation managed more than 5,100 contracts and resolved more than 16,000 requirements. This growth was absorbed by maintaining the service model and without proportionally increasing its monthly cost.
Impact for Legal and Procurement
The result was not only to process a higher volume. Legal management was able to respond to the growth of Procurement without allocating more internal structure to operational and recurrent tasks.
For Purchasing and Supply, the process gained fluidity and predictability. For Legal, the service allowed to maintain legal control and quality, reserving internal capacity for matters of greater complexity and strategic value.
"Today the contractual volume is handled with much more fluidity and predictability. The team understands our standard, has good legal criteria and responds in the timelines that the business needs."
Legal Manager | Forestry Company
An alternative to scalating legal capacity
This case shows that increasing the strength or hiring more hours of external advice are not the only responses to the growth of demand. One model of Legal Process Outsourcing can combine specialized talent, standardized processes and continuous improvement to increase capacity with predictable costs.
When Legal, Procurement and the LPO provider work with shared criteria, contractual management is no longer a succession of isolated reviews and becomes an operation capable of evolving along with business.
Do legal and procurement need to respond with more capacity and less friction?
In Alster We help legal management and areas of Procurement, Purchasing and Supply to manage your contractual demand through specialized equipment, standardized processes and continuous improvement.
Let's talk about how to scale your contractual operation.