Wellbore Integrity Solutions keeps global energy operations running safely and smoothly. Their work spans borders, varying regulations and complex corporate structures. But behind the scenes, their legal ops team was juggling dozens of entities and filing deadlines with no single place to track them all. Documents were scattered across disconnected filing systems and employee inboxes, outdated org charts were often distributed, compliance deadlines were overlooked resulting in late filings and penalties, and even simple compliance tasks took longer than they should have.
The Breaking Point: Too Many Entities, Not Enough Clarity
Diana Hendrix, Director of Legal Operations, was no stranger to complex systems. But when she joined Wellbore Integrity Solutions, the challenges weren’t just complex, they were chaotic, with entity data living in siloed spreadsheets.
“Some things simply were not within the formation docs, and they’d be hidden in the minutes of several meetings or resolutions. We’d go through 20 documents just to get track information such as a director appointment or removal,” Diana recalls.
The lean legal team was stuck in reactive mode. Requests like “What’s the tax ID?” or “Who’s authorized to sign?” or “Provide the license for this entity” came in daily and they all landed in the legal team’s inbox. No single source of truth existed for the company. One team relied on spreadsheets, another reused old documents. Nobody was completely sure who had the most accurate information.
”Sometimes team members would send outside parties an old version of an org chart for a KYC request or use it for a UBO filing, and those parties would come back with questions we couldn’t easily answer,” she says.
Entity data lived in a maze of board minutes, formation docs and nested SharePoint folders. People reused what they could find, whether or not it was current, and Diana became the help desk for anything even loosely related to entities. “Entity management was taking up time I didn’t have. It was only 10% of my job, but it was blocking me from the 90% that needed attention as well.”
Why Athennian, and Why Now
Diana had used plenty of legal tech before. She knew what didn’t work: clunky systems, slow interfaces and platforms that required IT tickets for basic updates. She needed flexibility, control over the company’s data and a user-intuitive platform her team could actually adopt and expand upon.
After reviewing other options, Athennian stood out because it offered something rare: real ownership. Diana could customize what mattered, move fast when needed and finally build a system around how her team worked, not the other way around.
AI That Does the Heavy Lifting
As Wellbore’s entity list grew, so did the workload. Every file had to be manually opened, renamed, categorized and tagged. It was repetitive, easy to misfile and pulled attention away from higher-value work.
Now, AI handles most of that. A virtual assistant based in the Philippines handles filings across all their entities. She doesn’t have a legal background, and she doesn’t need one. Instead of spending hours learning complex filing structures, she uploads documents into Athennian. The AI takes over from there: It reads the document and pulls the relevant details. The virtual assistant still has the final approval. Once she gives it a quick review and approves the task, the document is filed in just a few clicks.
“I don’t have to tell her where to put it anymore,” Diana says. “She sees it, the system recognizes what it is and she knows what to do.”
The result? Faster onboarding, fewer manual errors and less reliance on Diana for day-to-day tasks. Even when she’s out of office, the work continues. “It’s like having another team member, only this one doesn’t take vacation.”
One System, One Source of Truth
Before Athennian, finding basic entity info felt like solving a puzzle. One team might be working off a version from two years ago and departments worked from their own, separate data sources.
Now, everything is centralized. The team uses summary views to quickly find relevant entity information like tax IDs, registered addresses, authorized signatories — whatever they need. Instead of answering the same questions repeatedly, Diana just points people to the platform. “It has reduced my workload dramatically. Even if I’m out of the office, people aren’t panicking. It’s all there and accessible by team members across the globe.”
The platform’s permission settings also make it easy to loop in other departments without overwhelming them with unnecessary data. “We were able to put all this information into one spot. Teams didn’t have to go through different documents to find out who’s the authorized signatory or the parent entity, for example. It’s all in Athennian.”
Once Athennian was up and running, other teams started using it too. Accounting and tax uses it to track document dependencies for AGMs and filing deadlines associated with their department actions. Commercial teams can quickly access it for tender and bid submissions information. Finance pulls data for audits and company codes. “They trust the data now. At their fingertips, team members can find answers to their questions regardless of the time zone, without having to wait for me to respond hours later,” Diana says.
Scaling Knowledge Without Slowing Down
Getting new team members up to speed didn’t require long onboarding decks or hand-holding. Instead, Diana’s team recorded short Loom videos showing how to simply log in using SSO, access information, troubleshoot issues and how the platform functioned day-to-day.
It worked. People picked it up fast and the videos became a lightweight internal resource that scaled with the team. When an entirely new legal team came onboard, the transition proved to be seamless.
More Room for What Matters
Before Athennian, entity management took time from Diana that she couldn’t spare. It was a small part of her role on paper, but in practice, it blocked bigger priorities. That changed quickly with automation. Routine filings became automated reminders, documents became centralized and requests turned into self-serve workflows. As a result, when a major corporate restructuring hit, the team didn’t scramble. They were ready.
“The centralized function has been so beneficial to our team. I don’t have to micromanage or provide all pieces of information for simple document filing. My time is free to focus on the more complex strategic objectives of the department versus the labor- intensive administrative tasks that weighed our lean legal team down before.”