Leading digital transformation at global scale.

Deutsche Bank's Global Legal Department, spanning practice groups such as Corporate Finance, Litigation and Real Estate among many others, ran on legacy systems, manual handoffs and siloed document storage. The mandate: modernise the department's digital backbone and build one global golden repository for legal data, aligned with the bank's cloud-first data strategy. Rather than assume the answer, we started with global discovery to find the most pressing need and build a sound business case.

1. 01Global discovery: interviews and workshops across regions and practice groups surfaced a global document management system as the most urgent need.
2. 02Workflow mapping: once the business case was approved, deeper sessions mapped current workflows, pain points and manual work into business requirements.
3. 03Hands-on sandboxes: legal teams tested several Tier-1 enterprise cloud DMS options, judging workflow fit, user experience and intuitiveness.
4. 04Cloud-first selection and design: chose the platform that fit both the business and the bank's data strategy, then ran design and customisation sessions.
5. 05ADKAR phased rollout: a structured global change framework brought people along region by region.

• Global change management lead (full ownership): owned the change workstream worldwide, from strategy to regional execution.
• Designed the phased rollout on the Prosci ADKAR framework: Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, Reinforcement.
• Mobilised a change network of approximately 20 people, working with MDs and regional heads to secure buy-in and sustain adoption.
• Project management & discovery (core driver): heavily supported end-to-end orchestration; executive sign-off sat with the programme sponsors.
• Structured and facilitated the cross-regional interviews and workshops, shaped the business requirements and ran the vendor sandbox sessions.

Employees

~1,000

Adoption

90%

Annual savings

€500k

The rollout achieved 90% adoption and €500k in annual savings across four regions.

Outcomes supplied by Nabil Bertal. Internal banking materials are not published here.